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Research Ethics

Ethical Framework

BDLawCorpus is designed with research ethics as a foundational principle. This document outlines the ethical considerations, access principles, and non-misuse guarantees.

Purpose Statement

BDLawCorpus exists solely to support academic research by enabling structured, reproducible access to publicly available Bangladeshi legal texts.

Intended beneficiaries:

  • Academic researchers in legal informatics
  • Digital humanities scholars
  • Low-resource language researchers
  • Legal accessibility advocates

Not intended for:

  • Commercial data mining
  • Automated legal services
  • Mass surveillance or profiling
  • Any use requiring legal accuracy guarantees

Data Source Ethics

Source Legitimacy

All data originates from bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd, the official government source for Bangladeshi laws maintained by the Ministry of Law and Justice.

  • Public access: The source website is publicly accessible without authentication
  • Government publication: Content represents official government publications
  • No circumvention: No access controls, paywalls, or restrictions are bypassed

No Unauthorized Access

The tool:

  • Does NOT access private or restricted content
  • Does NOT bypass authentication mechanisms
  • Does NOT circumvent rate limiting (manual operation only)
  • Does NOT access content not intended for public viewing

Collection Principles

Transparency

  • All extraction operations are visible to the user
  • Source URLs are preserved in every export
  • Extraction timestamps enable verification
  • Tool identification is included in metadata

Minimal Intervention

  • Legal text is preserved exactly as rendered by the browser
  • No summarization, interpretation, or modification
  • No inference of legal meaning or effect
  • No resolution of ambiguities

Human Oversight

  • All extraction requires explicit user initiation
  • No background or automated operation
  • User reviews content before saving
  • User controls extraction timing and scope

Reproducibility

  • Methodology is fully documented
  • Extraction process is deterministic (for given DOM state)
  • Provenance chain is complete
  • Limitations are explicitly stated

Non-Misuse Guarantees

What This Tool Does NOT Do

  1. No Legal Advice: This tool does not provide, generate, or imply legal advice
  2. No Legal Interpretation: No inference of legal meaning, effect, or applicability
  3. No Amendment Resolution: No determination of which law supersedes another
  4. No Validity Claims: No assertion that extracted content is legally valid
  5. No Completeness Claims: No guarantee that any act is complete
  6. No Currency Claims: No assertion that content reflects current law

Prohibited Uses

Users MUST NOT use BDLawCorpus outputs for:

  • Providing legal advice to individuals or organizations
  • Making legal determinations in official proceedings
  • Automated legal decision-making systems
  • Any application requiring legal accuracy guarantees
  • Commercial legal services without additional validation
  • Training production ML systems without explicit risk acknowledgment

User Responsibility

Users of BDLawCorpus are responsible for:

  • Proper academic citation
  • Compliance with institutional research guidelines
  • Ethical use of extracted data
  • Understanding and communicating limitations
  • Independent verification of critical information

Data Integrity

Preservation Principles

  • Original Bengali text is preserved verbatim in content_raw
  • UTF-8 encoding is enforced throughout
  • No transliteration or translation is applied
  • Structural markers are detected but not modified

Modification Transparency

When modifications are applied (encoding fixes):

  • Original content is preserved in content_raw
  • All transformations are logged
  • Risk levels are classified (non-semantic vs. potential-semantic)
  • Potential-semantic changes are flagged but not applied

No Inference

The system explicitly does NOT:

  • Infer missing content
  • Correct perceived errors in legal text
  • Resolve apparent contradictions
  • Fill gaps in incomplete extractions

Access Principles

Open Access

  • Tool source code is publicly available
  • Methodology is fully documented
  • No proprietary algorithms or hidden processing
  • Community contributions welcome

Non-Commercial

  • Tool is provided free of charge
  • No commercial licensing restrictions on tool use
  • Extracted content subject to original source terms
  • Academic use is the primary intended purpose

Attribution

When using BDLawCorpus in research:

  • Cite the tool and methodology
  • Acknowledge limitations
  • Provide access to extraction metadata
  • Enable reproducibility where possible

Institutional Compliance

Research Ethics Boards

Researchers using BDLawCorpus should:

  • Consult institutional research ethics guidelines
  • Determine if ethics board approval is required
  • Document data collection methodology
  • Maintain appropriate data governance

Data Protection

  • No personal data is collected or processed
  • Legal texts are government publications
  • No user tracking or analytics
  • All processing occurs locally

Disclaimer

BDLawCorpus is provided "as is" for academic research purposes. The developers:

  • Make no warranties about fitness for any purpose
  • Accept no liability for misuse or misinterpretation
  • Do not guarantee accuracy, completeness, or currency
  • Are not responsible for downstream applications

Contact

For ethical concerns or questions about appropriate use, please open an issue in the project repository.