A neutral, authoritative, structured, machine-readable record of international and national space law, built to last for decades.
Status: Public — a neutral legal-infrastructure resource. The UN-level core is complete: 12 instruments (5 treaties, 5 GA principle instruments, 2 COPUOS soft-law guidelines), authoritative + derived layers, verified, self-validating and self-monitoring. Contributions and a co-maintainer are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Build history in CHANGELOG.md.
The authoritative structured record of space law, organised by neutral legal concepts (registration, liability, jurisdiction, non-appropriation, resource rights, abandonment/salvage, and others). It is a legal-infrastructure resource, not advocacy for any doctrine. It is designed to retain full value regardless of how any specific doctrine develops.
It is not a commentary, not a legal-advice service, and not organised around any single doctrine. No concept lens is the "point" of the corpus.
Provenance and version integrity override convenience, always. Every document carries, from its first commit: source URL, retrieval date, official citation, enacting jurisdiction, language, an authoritative-status flag, and a content hash. Every change is a new dated version — never an overwrite. Git provides the immutable, dated history.
authoritative/— primary source texts only, in their authentic enacting language, with full provenance. This is the legal record.derived/— everything machine- or human-generated: translations, summaries, concept tags, structure extraction. Always labelled as derived, always traceable to its authoritative source, never presented as authoritative.
Where a file lives tells you what it is. The two never mix.
Authoritative layer (23 records: 15 instruments with full provenance + SHA-256 hashes. The Outer Space Treaty is held in all five authentic languages (en/ru/fr/es/zh) and all five UN treaties carry their French authentic text — co-equal authoritative records per design doc 03. The five GA principle instruments, both soft-law guidelines, and all eight language records carry byte-exact official-PDF anchors). The 12 UN-level instruments carry English authentic text verified against an official UN source; a deliberate 3-instrument national pilot adds authentic-language national statutes:
- The five UN space treaties — Outer Space Treaty (1967), Rescue Agreement (1968), Liability Convention (1972), Registration Convention (1975), Moon Agreement (1979).
- The five UN General Assembly space-law principle instruments — Declaration of Legal Principles (1963), Direct Broadcasting (1982), Remote Sensing (1986), Nuclear Power Sources (1992), Benefits Declaration (1996).
- Two COPUOS soft-law guidelines — Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines (2007) and the Guidelines for the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities (2019).
- National-legislation pilot (3 instruments) — the US Space Resource Act (51 U.S.C. ch. 513; English), the Luxembourg space-resources law (2017; French), and the French Space Operations Act (Loi n° 2008-518; French, official consolidated version). Deliberate and instrument-by-instrument — see
docs/national-law-guide.md.
Derived layer (for each of the above): structure extraction and neutral concept tags — dual-pass reviewed: two independent model passes, every divergence adjudicated by the maintainer, per-unit consensus/adjudication status recorded (reviews/) — plus a cross-instrument concept index. A generated browsable site lives in site/.
Not yet ingested (deliberately, and tracked): national legislation beyond the current three-instrument pilot, and the IADC/PCA instruments pending the JC-5 licensing check. See docs/source-coverage.md and ROADMAP.md.
docs/design/ the locked design documents (start here)
docs/ source-coverage report, maintainer's guide
authoritative/ LAYER 1 — the legal record (see authoritative/README.md)
derived/ LAYER 2 — derived, unofficial products (see derived/README.md)
schema/ machine-checkable JSON Schemas for the metadata
queue/ borderline items awaiting a scope decision
scripts/ ingestion, hashing, validation, derived-build, source-watch tooling
monitoring/ watched-source list + latest monitor report
site/ generated browsable view — open site/index.html (built by scripts/build_site.py)
.github/workflows CI validation + automated source monitoring + annual review
- Need the law itself? Open
authoritative/<corpus-id>/<version>/text.txtand check itsmetadata.yamlfor provenance. - Want to navigate by concept or structure? Open the matching
derived/...files — everything there is unofficial and traceable back to a specific authoritative version. - Taking over maintenance? Read
docs/MAINTAINERS.md; a competent stranger can run and extend the corpus from it alone.
Read the design lock in docs/design/. Those six documents govern everything in this repository. For where the project is heading, see ROADMAP.md.
Citation metadata lives in CITATION.cff (GitHub renders a "Cite this repository"
button from it). The dataset is also published on Hugging Face as
dacheah/space-law-corpus — one JSONL row
per authoritative instrument version (full text + provenance) and one per concept-tagged provision.
Archived releases receive a DOI via Zenodo
content_hash of any text you rely on.
Our own contributions — the derived layer, schema, scripts, and documentation — are licensed CC BY 4.0 (see LICENSE). Source texts are not relicensed; each remains under its own terms, recorded in that document's metadata. See docs/design/04-licensing-policy.md.
Design locked 2026-07-02. Maintained at an annual cadence aligned to the COPUOS Legal Subcommittee session, with automated monitoring between reviews. See docs/MAINTAINERS.md.