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africalaws: Interface to the Laws.Africa API

Laws.Africa endeavours to facilitate African governments in offering sustainable, free access to dependable digital laws. It aims to achieve this by ensuring that the laws are easily accessible, user-friendly, educational, and reusable. This initiative seeks to empower citizens with knowledge of their legal rights and obligations while promoting transparency and accountability within the legal system. Laws.Africa offers a content application programming interface (API) to fetch legislative content and metadata. The API is a read-only API for listing and fetching published versions of legislative works. This package interfaces with this API to allow access using R.

What does africalaws do?

Please note that africalaws is still highly experimental and is undergoing a lot of development. Hence, any functionalities described below and in the rest of the package documentation have a high likelihood of changing interface or approach as we aim for a stable working version.

Currently, the package provides functions for:

  • Authenticating with the Laws.Africa API;
  • Performing a call to the countries API endpoint; and,
  • Performing a call to the works API endpoint.

From here, the plan is to continue developing functions that wrap the various available API endpoints.

Installation

africalaws is not yet on CRAN but can be installed from the Oxford IHTM R universe as follows:

install.packages(
  "africalaws",
  repos = c('https://oxfordihtm.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org')
)

Usage

The following vignettes describe how to use the africalaws package.

  • Authenticating with the Laws.Africa API

  • Listing out countries and areas/locations with available works from the Laws.Africa API

  • Listing out works for a specific country or areas/locations that are available from the Laws.Africa API

Citation

If you find the africalaws package useful please cite using the suggested citation provided by a call to the citation() function as follows:

citation("africalaws")
#> To cite africalaws in publications use:
#> 
#>   Jillian Francise Lee, Sanjeev Pugazhendhi, Ernest Guevarra, and
#>   Proochista Ariana (2024). africalaws: Interface to the Laws.Africa
#>   API. R package version 0.0.9000. URL
#>   https://oxford-ihtm.io/africalaws/
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Manual{,
#>     title = {africalaws: Interface to the Laws.Africa API},
#>     author = {{Jillian Francise Lee} and {Sanjeev Pugazhendhi} and {Ernest Guevarra} and {Proochista Ariana}},
#>     year = {2024},
#>     note = {R package version 0.0.9000},
#>     url = {https://oxford-ihtm.io/africalaws/},
#>   }

Community guidelines

Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are welcome; file issues or seek support here. If you would like to contribute to the package, please see our contributing guidelines.

This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.