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jlaw_citegraph — Japanese statutory law citations (JLaw-CiteGraph, 2026)

Description

Directed networks of the citations between the national laws of Japan in force in September and October 2026, from JLaw-CiteGraph (versions 2.0 to 2.5), a dataset built by automatic extraction of the references in the texts of the laws of e-Gov 法令検索 (e-Gov Law Search, the official law database of the Japanese Digital Agency), from its bulk downloads. The laws are the national statutes in force (in the latest snapshot, of 20 October 2026, 8,981 laws: 法律 acts 2,100, 政令 cabinet orders 2,310, 府省令 ministerial ordinances 4,095, 規則 rules 409, 勅令 imperial ordinances 66, and the constitution), each at the version in force on the date of the snapshot; local ordinances, case law, administrative circulars, treaties, repealed laws and amending acts are not included as nodes, and the citations to them are left out. The references were extracted by rules (exact titles and law numbers of the cited laws, abbreviations, anaphoric references such as 同法 "the same act" and 前条 "the preceding article"), with resolution rates reported by the authors of 93 % for references within a law, 82 % between laws and 92 % for relative references.

There are two networks for each of the six snapshots of the e-Gov data in the history of the dataset (2026-09-27, 2026-09-28, 2026-10-01, 2026-10-03, 2026-10-19 and 2026-10-20; the dataset was rebuilt from each new e-Gov bulk download), named laws_<date> and provisions_<date> (e.g. laws_2026-10-20):

  • laws_<date>: each node is a law (all of them, including those without citations), and a directed edge from law A to law B means that the text of A cites B (citations within the same law are not included), weighted by the number of citing provisions (70,774 edges in the latest snapshot).
  • provisions_<date>: each node is a provision of a law (an article, a paragraph, an item, an article of the supplementary provisions, or an attached table, form or figure), or a law as a whole, and a directed edge from A to B is a reference from provision A to B, of one of four kinds: CITES (a citation of another provision, in the same law or another one), DELEGATES_TO (a delegation, such as "as provided by cabinet order", from a provision to the law that it delegates to, as a whole), REFERS_TO_ATTACHMENT (a reference to an attached table, form, etc.) and AMENDS. Only the provisions that take part in some reference are included. The network is a multigraph: a few pairs of provisions are joined by references of different kinds. The hierarchy of the provisions (law, chapter, article, paragraph, item) is not included as edges; it can be recovered from the identifiers of the nodes.

The nodes are identified by the e-Gov law ids (e.g. 129AC0000000089 for the Civil Code), followed for provisions by their position within the law (e.g. 129AC0000000089_a709 for article 709 of the Civil Code, …_a10-2_p3_i12-2 for item 12-2 of paragraph 3 of article 10-2, …_asup-sp1-2 for article 2 of the supplementary provisions, …_at-style-1 for form 1).

The laws_<date> networks have the following properties:

  • (Node) law_id: the e-Gov law id; name: the title of the law (in Japanese); type: its type (法律, 政令, 府省令, 規則, 勅令, 憲法); url: the page of the law on e-Gov.
  • (Node) enforcement_date: the date on which the version of the law in the data came into force (YYYYMMDD); next_enforcement_date: the date of the next amendment that is already decided (empty if none); pending_versions: the number of amendments that are decided but not yet in force.
  • (Edge) count: the number of citations (pairs of citing provision and cited provision of the two laws).

The provisions_<date> networks have the following properties:

  • (Node) node_id: the identifier of the provision (see above).
  • (Node) level: its kind: law, article, paragraph, item, supplementary_article or attachment.
  • (Node) law_id, law_name, law_type: the id, the title and the type of the law that contains the provision.
  • (Edge) relation: CITES, DELEGATES_TO, REFERS_TO_ATTACHMENT or AMENDS.
  • (Edge) raw: the text of the reference (e.g. 前項, 第一条, 民法第七百九条).
  • (Edge) extracted_from: how the reference was resolved (e.g. canonical, alias, same_as_last, INTERNAL_PAT, REFERENTIAL/前項; see the data card).
  • (Edge) fallback_level: how precisely the target was located (e.g. exact, or the enclosing provision when the cited one was not found; empty if not given).
  • (Edge) confidence: the confidence of the resolution given by the authors (NaN if not given).
  • (Edge) pre_amendment: whether the citation names the text of the law before an amendment (e.g. "the former act"), whereas only the current text is in the graph.
Tags
Informational Citation Legal Weighted Multigraph Metadata
Added
2026-10-31
Citation
  • yabooung, "JLaw-CiteGraph: a citation graph of Japanese statutory law." Hugging Face dataset, versions 2.0-2.5 (2026) huggingface.co
Upstream URL OK
https://huggingface.co/datasets/yabooung/jp-law-citation-graph
https://github.com/yabooung/jp-law-citation-graph
https://laws.e-gov.go.jp/
Upstream license
CC BY 4.0 (data derived from e-Gov 法令検索, Digital Agency of Japan), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Networks
Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.
Column legend
$\left<k\right>$
Mean degree
$\sigma_k$
Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$
Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$
Random walk mixing time
$r$
Degree assortativity
$c$
Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$
(Pseudo-) diameter
$S$
Relative size of the largest component
NPs
Node properties
EPs
Edge properties
Name Nodes Edges $\left<k\right>$ $\sigma_k$ $\lambda_h$ $\tau$ $r$ $c$ $\oslash$ $S$ Kind Mode NPs EPs gt GraphML GML csv
laws_2026-09-27 8,998 70,577 7.84 42.83 100.49 11.83 -0.07 0.16 9 0.90 Directed Unipartite law_id name type url enforcement_date next_enforcement_date pending_versions count 339 KiB 548 KiB 547 KiB 581 KiB
provisions_2026-09-27 949,786 1,522,808 1.60 8.29 88.34 2581.57 -0.01 0.02 51 0.81 Directed Unipartite node_id level law_id law_name law_type relation raw extracted_from fallback_level confidence pre_amendment 11.7 MiB 20.4 MiB 18.6 MiB 22.7 MiB
laws_2026-09-28 8,998 70,578 7.84 42.83 100.49 11.83 -0.07 0.16 9 0.90 Directed Unipartite law_id name type url enforcement_date next_enforcement_date pending_versions count 338 KiB 548 KiB 548 KiB 581 KiB
provisions_2026-09-28 949,818 1,522,858 1.60 8.29 88.34 2499.02 -0.01 0.02 51 0.81 Directed Unipartite node_id level law_id law_name law_type relation raw extracted_from fallback_level confidence pre_amendment 11.7 MiB 20.4 MiB 18.6 MiB 22.7 MiB
laws_2026-10-01 9,002 70,731 7.86 42.93 100.62 10.06 -0.07 0.16 9 0.90 Directed Unipartite law_id name type url enforcement_date next_enforcement_date pending_versions count 338 KiB 549 KiB 548 KiB 581 KiB
provisions_2026-10-01 951,002 1,526,702 1.61 8.31 88.34 2581.52 -0.01 0.02 51 0.81 Directed Unipartite node_id level law_id law_name law_type relation raw extracted_from fallback_level confidence pre_amendment 11.7 MiB 20.4 MiB 18.7 MiB 22.7 MiB
laws_2026-10-03 9,003 70,732 7.86 42.93 100.62 10.06 -0.07 0.16 9 0.90 Directed Unipartite law_id name type url enforcement_date next_enforcement_date pending_versions count 338 KiB 548 KiB 547 KiB 581 KiB
provisions_2026-10-03 951,030 1,526,763 1.61 8.31 88.34 2581.55 -0.01 0.02 51 0.81 Directed Unipartite node_id level law_id law_name law_type relation raw extracted_from fallback_level confidence pre_amendment 11.7 MiB 20.4 MiB 18.7 MiB 22.7 MiB
laws_2026-10-19 8,981 70,772 7.88 43.01 100.71 10.06 -0.07 0.16 9 0.90 Directed Unipartite law_id name type url enforcement_date next_enforcement_date pending_versions count 338 KiB 548 KiB 548 KiB 581 KiB
provisions_2026-10-19 951,457 1,528,205 1.61 8.31 88.34 2581.58 -0.01 0.02 51 0.81 Directed Unipartite node_id level law_id law_name law_type relation raw extracted_from fallback_level confidence pre_amendment 11.7 MiB 20.4 MiB 18.7 MiB 22.7 MiB
laws_2026-10-20 8,981 70,774 7.88 43.01 100.71 10.06 -0.07 0.16 9 0.90 Directed Unipartite law_id name type url enforcement_date next_enforcement_date pending_versions count 338 KiB 548 KiB 548 KiB 581 KiB
provisions_2026-10-20 951,458 1,528,207 1.61 8.31 88.34 2581.59 -0.01 0.02 51 0.81 Directed Unipartite node_id level law_id law_name law_type relation raw extracted_from fallback_level confidence pre_amendment 11.7 MiB 20.4 MiB 18.7 MiB 22.7 MiB