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laws.sg

Methodology

How laws.sg sources & verifies the law

laws.sg is a structural layer over official Singapore legal sources. Each work is parsed into its real hierarchy — parts, sections, sub-sections, provisions — so every unit carries a stable anchor and can be opened at its own address rather than as a fragment of a long page. References a work makes to other instruments are resolved against the corpus and rendered as links; in-force status and amendment history are carried from recorded relationships between instruments rather than inferred; and every page states the date its content was last updated.

What that structure holds is the source text itself — reorganised for navigation, never rewritten. Here is exactly where the text comes from, how it is processed and checked, and how current it is.

  1. 1. Sourcing

    Every work is taken from its official publisher (for example, the Singapore Attorney-General's Chambers / government gazette). Each page links back to that authoritative source, and the structured data records it as the canonical origin. Where a work is only available from an unofficial archive, the page is labelled as such.

  2. 2. Structuring

    The official text is parsed into its natural hierarchy — parts, sections, sub-sections, and provisions — so each unit has a stable, citable anchor and its own URL: a single provision can be linked to, opened, and cited on its own. References to other instruments are resolved against the corpus and rendered as links to those instruments where we hold them, so a cross-reference is something you can follow rather than a string to search for. The text inside that structure is untouched — we never paraphrase or summarise the legal text; the provision text you read is the source text, reorganised for navigation, not rewritten.

  3. 3. Verifying

    Parsed works are checked against the source for structural fidelity, and readers can flag corrections on any provision — open any Singapore law and use Suggest a fix beside the provision, or report anything else. Status (in force, amended, repealed) and amendment history are derived from recorded relationships between instruments, not inferred.

  4. 4. Freshness

    Each work shows when its content was last updated. Re-parses and corrections bump that date, and the sitemap reflects it, so search engines and AI assistants can tell how current a page is.

Found something wrong?

This page describes how the corpus is meant to work. When it doesn't — a missing instrument, text that doesn't match the gazette, a dead source link, or content that should be removed — that report is how it gets fixed.

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Not legal advice

laws.sg is a free, public interface for reading and citing Singapore law. It is not legal advice. Always verify against the official publisher before relying on any text.