Project Overview
This project is designed to automate the process of scraping and analyzing Maryland legal statutes. It leverages web scraping techniques to extract legal information and organizes it for research and visualization purposes.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Automated Scraping | Collects legal texts from online databases. |
| Categorization | Organizes statutes by legal topics for easy navigation. |
| Metadata Creation | Generates searchable metadata for each statute. |
| Visualization | Displays relationships between legal statutes. |
Technical Approach
# Sample Python Scraping Snippet
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "https://www.law.cornell.edu/maryland"
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
statutes = soup.select('.statute-item')
for statute in statutes:
title = statute.select_one('.title').text
text = statute.select_one('.text').text
print(f"Statute: {title}\n{text}\n")
Preliminary Findings
Criminal Law § 3-202
Assault in the second degree...
Last Updated: 2023-08-01Family Law § 5-303
Child custody considerations...
Last Updated: 2023-07-15Commercial Law § 2-314
Implied warranty of merchantability...
Last Updated: 2023-09-01Beta
Here you can view the very first launch of the project. Like that of a proof of concept. See here.