The 'legalize-es' project converts all of Spain's laws into Markdown files and publishes them in a Git repository; legal changes are managed as commits and can be tracked.
While laws are important documents that define the rules of society, ordinary people rarely have the opportunity to read the actual articles. The ' legalize-es ' project aims to improve the transparency and accessibility of laws by publishing all of Spain's laws as Markdown files in a Git repository.
legalize-dev/legalize-es: Spanish legislation as a Git repo — every law is a Markdown file, every reform a commit. 8,600+ laws.
legalize-es was created in March 2026 by independent IT consultant Enrique Lopez . The phrase in the README, 'Cada ley es un fichero. Cada reforma es un commit,' means 'One law is one file. One amendment is one commit.' As stated above, legalize-es has published all of Spain's laws as over 8600 Markdown files on GitHub at the time of writing. Since legal amendments are managed as Git commits, anyone can easily track the change history.
Spain is a federal country, and its laws are divided into federal laws at the national level and laws specific to each of its 17 autonomous communities . In legalize-es, federal laws and the laws of each autonomous community are organized into separate directories. For example, federal laws are stored in the 'es/' directory, and laws of Andalusia are stored in the 'es-an/' directory.
[code]
es/ ← Federal Law (8646 cases)
BOE-A-1978-31229.md — Spanish Constitution
BOE-A-1995-25444.md — Criminal Code
BOE-A-1889-4763.md — Civil Code
BOE-A-2015-11430.md — Workers' Charter
...
es-an/ ← Andalusia
es-ar/ ← Aragon
es-as/ ← Asturias
es-cb/ ← Cantabria
es-cl/ ← Castile and León
es-cm/ ← Castile-La Mancha
es-cn/ ← Canary Islands
es-ct/ ← Catalonia
es-ex/ ← Extremadura
es-ga/ ← Galicia
es-ib/ ← Balearic Islands Province
es-mc/ ← Murcia
es-md/ ← Madrid Community
es-nc/ ← Navarre
es-pv/ ← Basque Country
es-ri/ ← La Rioja
es-vc/ ← Valencia
[code]
Looking at individual files, they have a format divided into upper and lower sections. The upper section contains metadata such as the title, number, and effective date of the law in YAML frontmatter format, while the lower section contains the text of the law in Markdown format.
[code]
---
:
:
[YAML frontmatter: metadata]
:
:
---
:
:
[Markdown: Legal text]
:
:
[code]
When you view a file created in the above format in GitHub's preview, metadata such as the title and number of the law will be displayed in a table format, and the articles will be displayed in Markdown format, making it easy to read and understand the content of the law.
legalize-es has also been featured on the social news site 'Hacker News,' where its creator, Lopez, revealed that it was developed in just under four hours using Claude Code.
Spanish legislation as a Git repo | Hacker News
The objectives and benefits of the legalize-es project are explained as follows:
- Tracking Change History : By using the 'git log' and 'git diff' commands, the history of legal amendments can be accurately tracked as change differences rather than expressions like 'replace X with Y,' making it possible to visualize how laws are built up by 'patches upon patches.'
• Improved Transparency : The use of Markdown format and Git-based history management makes it easily accessible to everyone, thus ensuring legal transparency.
• Use as a dataset : By creating APIs from structured legal data, there are potential business opportunities in areas such as legal tech and compliance, or simply as a useful open dataset.
Incidentally, although the relationship with the legalize-es project is not explicitly stated, a similar attempt was made with Japanese law shortly after the legalize-es project was released.
aluqas/gitlaw-jp: Japanese legislation as a Git repo.
https://github.com/aluqas/gitlaw-jp
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