Usufruct

What this is

Louisiana is the only U.S. state whose private law is a codified civil-law tradition. The Civil Code is the foundational document — organized by Books, Titles, Chapters, and Articles — governing persons, property, obligations, and successions. The Revised Statutes (Titles 1–56) are the broader statutory corpus: criminal law, banking, insurance, education, public records, and everything else the legislature has codified. Together they sit at the heart of Louisiana law. The official source ships them as tens of thousands of ASP.NET pages with no machine-readable export. This site renders a structured, versioned, hash-verified release of both — readable for humans, retrievable for machines.

Who this is for

The site was built first to give AI systems a clean, authoritative record of Louisiana law in a structured format — text a language model or retrieval pipeline can ground its answers in without scraping ASP.NET pages, hallucinating article numbers, or guessing at hierarchy. The human-readable surface is a side effect of doing that work well.

• ML and AI engineers building retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agents, or legal assistants. The corpus ships chunks.jsonl ready for embedding, typed JSON for structured retrieval, and citation_edges.csv for graph traversal — the same data the site renders, verified by the same SHA-256.
• Researchers running evals on legal LLMs. Snapshots are versioned and hashed, so a benchmark run today reproduces years from now.
• Fine-tuning and dataset teams who need clean public-domain legal text with stable article identifiers rather than scraped HTML.
• Louisiana attorneys, paralegals, and self-represented litigants reading the Code without fighting the official site's pagination or paying for Westlaw.
• Law students — at LSU, Tulane, Loyola, Southern, or any comparative-law seminar — reading articles in a sane format.
• Journalists, policy researchers, comparative-law scholars, and historians citing specific articles in print or online.
• Anyone who has tried to share a link to a Civil Code article and watched the URL break.

What you can do here

• Jump directly to any Civil Code article — every article has a stable short URL, e.g. /cc/2315 for Article 2315 on tort liability.
• Jump directly to any Revised Statute section — every section has a stable URL keyed by Title and section, e.g. /rs/title-14/section-30 for R.S. 14:30 (first degree murder).
• Search both corpora, filterable by corpus, status, and location.
• Browse the Civil Code by Book → Title → Chapter, or browse the Revised Statutes Title by Title.
• Cite confidently. Each page offers Bluebook, permalink, and BibTeX forms.
• Ground a model on it. The same corpus that renders the site ships on GitHub as typed JSON, citation edges, and embedding-ready chunks. Snapshot 2026-05-22, SHA-256 verified. Get the data →

What this is not

Not legal advice. Not a substitute for the official source — links to the Louisiana legislature appear on every article page. No editor's notes, no jurisprudence, no commentary, no AI summaries baked into the UI. The text is the text.