OpenContracts Authority Packs

Curated bodies of law for OpenContracts citation enrichment: each top-level directory is a schema-v2 authority pack — a citation taxonomy (namespaces, aliases, equivalences, grammar abbreviations) plus seeded corpora of verbatim law, installable into any OpenContracts deployment.

Packs live here, out of the platform repo, so deployments install only the jurisdictions they want and the platform's MIT license stays untangled from pack content licensing.

Installing a pack

From an OpenContracts checkout (fetches from this repo, validates, installs):

python manage.py install_authority_pack fort_worth --creator <username> --public

Useful variants:

python manage.py install_authority_pack --list                 # what's available
python manage.py install_authority_pack fort_worth --check     # fetch + preflight only
python manage.py install_authority_pack fort_worth --ref main --creator <u> --public

Restart celery workers after install — the grammar-tier pack config is cached per process.

Manual alternative (no management command): clone this repo wholesale and point AUTHORITY_PACK_ROOTS at the clone; every directory containing a pack.yaml is auto-discovered.

git clone https://github.com/Open-Source-Legal/authority-packs /srv/authority-packs
export AUTHORITY_PACK_ROOTS=/srv/authority-packs
python manage.py load_authority_pack --path /srv/authority-packs/fort_worth --creator <u> --public

Catalog

A pack is one body of law: one publisher, one update cadence, one provenance story, one approval status. That is deliberately small. A pack that spans several bodies of law forces every revision to the reasoning to re-release megabytes of unchanged text, and every routine currency refresh to reopen the reasoning for review. Assemblies are built by composing packs — see Domains below.

United States, federal (us)

Pack	Corpora	Sections
aeca	Arms Export Control Act, by OLRC release point	55
itar	ITAR (22 C.F.R. 120-130) · U.S. Munitions List (Categories I-XXI)	210
ddtc	DDTC FAQs and guidance · enforcement and consent agreements · commodity-jurisdiction practice · advisory opinions	76
ear	Export Administration Regulations · Commerce Control List (638 ECCNs)	1,270
ofac	OFAC sanctions regulations, 31 C.F.R. Chapter V (rules, not rosters)	978
cfius	CFIUS / FIRRMA, 31 C.F.R. Parts 800 and 802	194
ecra	Export Control Reform Act · IEEPA · National Emergencies Act	38
export_fedreg	Federal Register rule preambles (State/BIS/OFAC) · executive orders	901
export_caselaw	Federal court decisions construing the AECA, ITAR and EAR	5
multilateral_regimes	Wassenaar · MTCR · Nuclear Suppliers Group · Australia Group control lists	59
doj_data_security	DOJ Data Security Program, 28 C.F.R. Part 202	104
nuclear_exports	NRC 10 C.F.R. Part 110 · DOE 10 C.F.R. Part 810	123
nispom	NISPOM, 32 C.F.R. Part 117	25
dfars	DFARS and FAR export-control clauses, 48 C.F.R.	641

City of Fort Worth, Texas (us-tx-fort-worth)

Pack	Corpora	Sections
fort_worth	City Code procurement and construction provisions · City Charter (selected chapters) · Texas procurement & contract-verification statutes · Building Administrative Code · local amendments to the 2021 IRC · Zoning Ordinance (residential) · Texas residential trade licensing & restrictive covenants	881

Each pack's README.md documents its contents, provenance, and design notes.

Domains

A domain pack composes atomic base packs and supplies the wiring that belongs to none of them — the corpus group, the orchestrator persona describing how those bodies of law interact, cross-pack equivalences, and optionally a consumer_agent increment for whichever corpus ends up consuming the domain. It carries little or no text of its own.

Domain	Composes	Purpose
us-export-control	14 packs: aeca itar ddtc ear ofac cfius ecra export_fedreg export_caselaw multilateral_regimes doj_data_security nuclear_exports nispom dfars	Which regime governs a transfer, and what else must clear before it proceeds

See DOMAIN_PACKS.md for the shape and the install contract.

Source providers

A pack may ship the code that fetches its own authority text, under <pack>/providers/. No pack does yet. See SOURCE_PROVIDERS.md for the contract — including why most packs should ship a key translator that delegates to the platform's CFR / U.S. Code / Federal Register providers rather than a scraper, and what it means that installing such a pack executes its Python.

Licensing

Pack content in this repository is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike).

Two important qualifications:

1. The law itself is not ours to license. Statutes, ordinances, charters, and other edicts of government are in the public domain (Veeck v. SBCCI, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002) (en banc); Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 590 U.S. 255 (2020)). The verbatim legal text inside a pack may be copied freely by anyone, from any source. CC BY-SA applies to what we authored: the selection and arrangement, citation taxonomies, alias and equivalence mappings, chapter overviews, personas, charters, and other editorial apparatus.
2. Attribution for the authored apparatus: "OpenContracts Authority Packs, Open-Source-Legal" with a link back to this repository satisfies the BY requirement.

The OpenContracts platform itself remains MIT-licensed; packs are data loaded at runtime and impose no licensing obligation on the platform or on deployments' own documents.

Contributing a pack

Open a PR — the template walks through provenance, licensing, and validation. CI runs scripts/validate_pack.py (a dependency-light structural mirror of the OpenContracts preflight) against every pack on every PR; run it locally first:

pip install pyyaml
python scripts/validate_pack.py <pack_name>     # or --all

The canonical validator remains OpenContracts' own preflight (manage.py load_authority_pack --check); run it before shipping a pack to a real deployment.

Authoring new packs

See the OpenContracts guide: docs/guides/authoring-authority-packs.md. The in-tree bolivia pack and example_utility test fixture remain the minimal worked examples; packs here are the real-jurisdiction catalog.