PHAROS DATA ARK · 2026-10-29-01024f5b59

State and territorial legal coverage

The Ark includes a compact constitutional-text baseline for all 50 states,

the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.

American Samoa, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands currently link to the locally

stored federal Title 48 framework; that is not a local constitution or code.

Open /library-files/civic-reference/jurisdictions/index.html for exact coverage.

Documents are snapshots. Retrieval dates do not establish legal currency.

Entire state statute codes, regulations, case law, local ordinances, uncodified

laws and later amendments are not implied by a jurisdiction entry.

Sources and regeneration

deploy/reference/jurisdictions.json is the human-readable source catalogue.

It records official state sources discovered via Cornell LII and an attributed

University of Wisconsin 50 Constitutions fallback referenced by the Library of

Congress. Only constitutional provision fields are extracted from the fallback;

research annotations and history are excluded. Retain attribution and original

notices; the university fallback is for noncommercial educational/reference use.

Run /usr/bin/python3 tools/install_jurisdictions.py --acquire from /opt/dataark.

The installer verifies PDF structure, substantial text, jurisdiction identity,

constitutional subject, and legislative/executive provisions. It refuses short

index pages, encrypted PDFs and obvious access-denied pages. TLS validation stays

on. Publisher snapshots may be dated; failures remain explicit gaps. It reuses

verified local files, so repair runs do not discard good copies.

Acquisition uses two workers, at most nine candidate pages per jurisdiction,

50 MiB per document and a 2 GiB registration cap. Actual first acquisition was

about 43 MiB. Source URLs, retrieval times, hashes, failed attempts, provenance

and counts of extracted provisions are in sources.json beside the content.

The content profile has a jurisdictions recipe after resilience. Its catalogue

and source snapshot travel in DATA-ARK-CONFIG; source and installer travel in

DATA-ARK-RECOVERY. Restoring from configuration requires internet and an available

publisher, as with other collections. Existing verified copies are reused.

Compact constitutions and national reference text justify nationwide coverage.

Public state statute bulk downloads also merit nationwide acquisition where

publishers provide verified complete editions; do not substitute a website index

for a code. Record volume, edition and any incomplete chapters before activation.

Common blank forms and official preparedness guides are suitable for broad

coverage when editions and identity can be verified. Site-specific instructions,

forms requiring personal details and completed forms are not public collection

material. Keep detailed parcels, topographic PDFs and imagery regional; all-area

imagery and municipal archives have much higher storage/update costs. Commercial

model-code books require a lawful source/license and are not scraped from viewers.