Access Danish acts, regulations and treaties from Retsinformation, the official state legal information system, through its European Legislation Identifier (ELI) service.
danlex is part of lexverse, a family of R packages for legal and regulatory data alongside eurlex, finlex and swelex.
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("KristianVepsalainen/danlex")Danish instruments are cited by year and number, which maps directly onto an identifier:
library(danlex)
doc <- dlx_get_doc("lta", 1998, 763)
doc$title
#> [1] "Bekendtgørelse om indbetaling af Den Særlige Pensionsopsparing for medlemmer af arbejdsløshedskasser for lønmodtagere ved udbetaling af dagpenge m.v."
doc$document_type
#> [1] "Bekendtgørelse"Text is structured down to the subsection, so provisions can be handled as data rather than parsed out of a blob:
p <- dlx_get_paragraphs("lta", 2025, 50)
p[1:3, c("paragraf", "stk", "text")]
#> # A tibble: 3 × 3
#> paragraf stk text
#> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 § 1. <NA> Formålet med erhvervsakademiuddannelsen som maritim teknolog…
#> 2 § 1. Stk. 2. Den uddannede skal have viden, færdigheder og kompetencer (l…
#> 3 § 1. Stk. 3. Den uddannede, som har gennemført de maritime valgfag, skal …Cross-references come as an edge table, and the accession numbers it returns can be fed straight back in:
refs <- dlx_get_references("lta", 1998, 763)
refs[, c("ref_accn", "ref_date", "ref_title")]
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#> ref_accn ref_date ref_title
#> <chr> <date> <chr>
#> 1 A19990059229 1999-07-14 Bekendtgørelse af lov om arbejdsløshedsforsikring m.v.
#> 2 A19990066629 1999-08-19 Bekendtgørelse af lov om en aktiv arbejdsmarkedspolit…
dlx_get_doc(accn = refs$ref_accn[1])$title
#> [1] "Bekendtgørelse af lov om arbejdsløshedsforsikring m.v."See vignette("danlex") for a fuller walk-through.
| Function | Purpose |
|---|---|
dlx_get_doc() |
Metadata for one document |
dlx_get_docs() |
Metadata for many, with error recovery |
dlx_get_text() |
Running text |
dlx_get_paragraphs() |
One row per provision |
dlx_get_references() |
Citations as an edge table |
dlx_get_changes() |
Recent changes, at least 60 days |
dlx_list_documents() |
The whole corpus index |
dlx_index_status(), dlx_clear_index() |
Manage the session index |
Around 200,000 documents in seven collections:
| Code | Content | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
lta |
Lovtidende A — acts and regulations | 1852– |
ltb, ltc |
Lovtidende B and C — the latter treaties | 1936– |
mt |
Ministerialtidende | 1871–2012 |
retsinfo |
Administrative decisions | 1665– |
fob |
Ombudsman decisions | 1980– |
ft |
Folketinget documents | by session |
Three points worth knowing before relying on the data:
Full text begins in late 2007. Retsinformation
returns document content only for material published from 25 September
2007 onward; earlier documents carry metadata alone, reported as
status = "metadata_only". Metadata itself is complete for
the whole range above.
Some collections have ended. Ministerialtidende was discontinued in 2012 and treaty publication drops off sharply after 2008. An empty result for a given year may mean nothing was published rather than that something is missing.
References are maintained, not historical. Cross-references point at the current consolidated version of the parent instrument, so a 1998 regulation commonly cites acts dated 1999 or later. Any citation network built from this data must account for that.
Data is provided by Civilstyrelsen. Consult the terms at https://www.retsinformation.dk/api before redistributing it or using it commercially. danlex is licensed MIT; the underlying data is not covered by that licence.