BLAD: A Historically Contextualized, Multilingual Dataset of Bangladeshi Legal Acts (1799 to 2025)
Computation and Language
Summary
The authors created the Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset (BLAD), which is a collection of 1,484 laws passed from 1799 to 2025. Each law includes full text, sections, footnotes, and details like when it was made and if it's still active. The dataset includes laws in English, Bengali, and mixed languages, helping researchers study law changes over time in Bangladesh. This resource fills a gap for legal language studies in South Asia and is openly available for public use.
Authors
Adib Sakhawat
Abstract
We present the Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset (BLAD), a curated collection of 1{,}484 legislative acts enacted between 1799 and 2025. Each act is represented with its full text, structured sections and footnotes, repeal status, and metadata linking it to the governing regime, head of state, and prevailing legal framework at the time of enactment. The corpus spans English, Bengali, and mixed-language documents, supporting temporal and multilingual analysis of statutory law. BLAD addresses a persistent gap in legal natural language processing (NLP) resources for low-resource, civil-law jurisdictions in South Asia. We describe the acquisition and enrichment pipeline, report descriptive statistics over more than two centuries of legislation, and outline the research directions the corpus enables. The dataset is publicly available under the CC~BY-SA~4.0 license at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sakhadib/bangladesh-legal-acts-dataset.