About

Usufruct publishes the Louisiana Civil Code and the Louisiana Revised Statutes — together the bulk of Louisiana's enacted law — as a clean, searchable web artifact. The text is public domain. The project exists because the official source (legis.la.gov) ships them as tens of thousands of disconnected ASP.NET pages with no machine-readable export, weak typography, and brittle URLs.

A usufruct, in civil law, is the right to use and enjoy a thing belonging to another. Usufruct comes from the Latin usus (use) and fructus (fruit) — literally the right to use something and enjoy its benefits. This is what the site is: enjoyment of a public document, made usable.

Provenance

The corpus is produced by the open-source Usufruct project: a scrape + structured-extraction pipeline that turns legis.la.gov into typed JSON, a hierarchical tree, citation edges, and per-article markdown. Snapshots ship as versioned GitHub Releases. This site is a downstream consumer of those releases. The build downloads the latest release zip, verifies its SHA-256, and renders the Code from those files. No private feed, no privileged data access — the same build would run on anyone's laptop.

Active snapshot: 2026-05-22. Civil Code: 3,623 article records across 410 containers. Revised Statutes: 45,774 section records across 5529 containers.

Methodology

• The Civil Code is the union of Preliminary Title and Books I–IV. The Revised Statutes are Titles 1–56 (with letter-suffixed and renumbered titles). Every slot in either corpus is rendered as a page, including repealed and reserved slots. A reader Googling "la civ code 2310" or "la rev stat 14:30" lands somewhere real, not a 404.
• Civil Code article URLs are flat and citable: /cc/{number}. Revised Statutes section URLs are Title-keyed: /rs/title-{title}/section-{number}, since RS section numbers are not globally unique. Hierarchical URLs are for browsing only. Permalinks do not change when names or editorial structure change upstream.
• Cross-references between articles and sections come from each corpus's citation_edges.csv. "References" lists outgoing edges; "Cited by" lists incoming. Both are stable per snapshot.
• Legislative history is rendered from structured acts_citations; when those are unavailable, the raw history string is shown.
• Each page exposes a one-line provenance footer with the snapshot tag, scrape timestamp, and a truncated source-HTML hash. A change in the upstream source flips the hash, so divergence is visible.

Citing

Every article and section page has a Cite action that produces three forms:

• Bluebook: La. Civ. Code art. 2315 (2026). for Civil Code articles; La. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 14:30 (2026). for Revised Statutes sections.
• Permalink: the canonical absolute URL on theusufruct.com.
• BibTeX: a @misc entry including the snapshot tag.

The year in the Bluebook form is derived from the snapshot's generated_at timestamp, not the year of viewing. Old snapshots remain consistent.

What this site avoids

• No tracking cookies, no client-side analytics, no third-party fonts.
• No editor's notes, jurisprudence, or commentary — these would require copyrighted source material and editorial judgment outside the project's scope.
• No AI summaries, embeddings, or semantic search baked into the site UI. The raw chunks for downstream RAG live in the corpus release as chunks.jsonl.

Disclaimer

This site is not legal advice. For binding text, defer to the official version at the Louisiana legislature. The provenance footer on each article page links directly to its source. Errors in the corpus or in the rendering can be reported as issues on the upstream repository or emailed to support@theusufruct.com.