@pipeworx/arkansas-code

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Tools: 2

Arkansas Code of 1987 — section lookup by citation, and topic/keyword search over official catchlines. Fleet #2881, one of the four remaining states with no <state>-code pack (Mississippi now has one too — fleet #2883). Keyless.

Tools

• ar_statute(citation) — the text of one Ark. Code Ann. section by citation ("5-10-101", capital murder; "4-70-101"; "Ark. Code Ann. § 5-10-101"). Returns the catchline, the operative statutory text, the History. line (the Acts that enacted/amended it), other legislative notes when present, AND a later_acts overlay — every act the Arkansas legislature’s own index shows touching this exact citation since the 2020-11-06 snapshot (fleet #2906, see “The overlay” below). Case-law annotations are deliberately excluded — they can run to hundreds of KB per heavily-litigated section.
• ar_search(query, limit?) — topic/keyword search over official section catchlines across all 28 titles (e.g. "capital murder", "security deposit"). Not full-text search — see “Known gaps”.

Auth

Keyless. No signup, no login, on either side of the call.

Data source, and why this isn’t a Lexis call

The official Arkansas Code is published through LexisNexis’s “free public access” portal (lexisnexis.com/hottopics/arcode -> advance.lexis.com) — verified live (2026-10-09): the landing page needs real browser JS to pass a cookie/fingerprint check, and granting it cookies anyway just 302s to an authentication endpoint (/lnaccess/mip/authn?...) that answers HTTP 405 with x-amzn-waf-action: captcha. codes.findlaw.com/ar/ and law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/ both serve their actual title/section pages behind a Cloudflare bot challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge, HTTP 403).

• https://unicourt.github.io/cic-code-ar/ — a GitHub Pages copy of the Arkansas Code, built by UniCourt on behalf of Public.Resource.Org from the Code’s own officially-released RTF volumes (archive.org/download/gov.ar.code), “in the public domain, NO RIGHTS RESERVED” per that repo’s own README. One title per HTML page (gov.ar.code.title.{NN}.html, zero-padded to 2 digits, 28 titles), fetched LIVE per ar_statute call — this pack proxies it, it does not ship a copy of the Code in the repo (mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does-not in the Pipeworx CLAUDE.md licence section).

  The underlying statutory TEXT is public law regardless of what any publisher’s licence says about its own rendering — enacted law carries no copyright (Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); Veeck v. SBCCI, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002) (en banc)).

THE HONEST LIMIT. This source carries three releases — r76 (2020-04-20), r77 (2020-08-18), r78 (2020-11-06), confirmed live via the GitHub contents API (2026-10-09) — and this pack uses r78, the newest. It is a static snapshot, not a continuously updated feed: Arkansas amendments enacted after 2020-11-06 are not reflected. Every response carries current_through and data_as_of: "2020-11-06" rather than defaulting to “now”. For anything enacted since, verify against the official LexisNexis-hosted Code or the Arkansas Code Revision Commission.

(This pack originally shipped against a 2012 Public.Resource.Org XML scan — the only Worker-reachable text known at the time. A same-day follow-up pointed at this newer UniCourt mirror, 8+ years fresher; the switch is confirmed live: Ark. Code Ann. § 5-10-101’s History. line now runs through “2019, No. 910, § 666” versus 2011 in the old source.)

The overlay: later acts, never merged (fleet #2906)

Bruce kept ar_statute on the frozen 2020-11-06 snapshot (“we’ll need to figure something out”) rather than chase a fully reconciled current code. This overlay is the cheapest honest improvement on top of that decision — design and measurements in docs/current-statute-routes.md (#2902) — and is the first of three planned (Mississippi and Tennessee follow with their own home-built indexes once this proves out).

The rule: never rewrite the snapshot text. Only ever ADD a dated, linked list beside it, explicitly labelled as not merged. ar_statute’s response carries:

• later_acts — one entry per act that touched this exact citation since the snapshot date: act_number, session (human-readable, e.g. “2025 - Regular Session, 2025”), link (the act’s own PDF), bill (the measure number), flags (any subset of EC/RP/NS/RN — Emergency Clause / Repealed / New Section / Renumbered), source: "arkleg", and merged: false. Empty ([]) means the index shows no later act for this citation across every session checked — not that the overlay failed to load (a missing/malformed KV index throws loudly instead, same as ar_search’s catchline index below).
• sessions_checked — every biennium/session the index covers, named even when later_acts is empty, so a caller can tell “nothing changed” from “we didn’t check.”
• later_acts_data_as_of — when the overlay was last baked.
• date: null on every act entry, honestly — the source index gives session + act number + PDF link, not a per-act enactment date (that line lives inside each act’s own PDF, not in the index); guessing a date from the session’s year would be worse than saying so.

Source: the Arkansas General Assembly’s own “Code Sections Amended” tool (arkleg.state.ar.us/Acts/CodeSectionsAmended) calls a keyless endpoint — /Acts/CodeSection?section=<title>&ddBienniumSession=<session> — that returns every citation touched in a biennium/session: the citation, the amending Act’s number and PDF link, EC/RP/NS/RN flags, and the bill number. Confirmed live and from a throwaway wrangler dev --remote edge probe on the prod Cloudflare account (2026-10-09/10): byte-identical to a laptop curl, HTTP 200, no bot wall, no JS rendering required. We are calling the index the state already maintains — the proxy shape (mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does- not in root CLAUDE.md), same as ar_statute’s own live fetch above.

A section not found in the Release-78 snapshot but present in the overlay is flagged specially: ar_statute’s found: false response carries later_acts_if_created — if the legislature’s index shows acts against a citation that does not exist in the 2020 snapshot, that is a signal the section may have been CREATED after the snapshot date, not necessarily a bad citation.

For Mississippi and Tennessee (next): reuse, don’t re-derive. Arkansas is the cheap case because the legislature publishes the citation→act index directly — Mississippi and Tennessee do not (per docs/current-statute- routes.md), so their overlays need a home-built index crawled from signed- bill text instead of one state-maintained endpoint. What DOES carry over directly: the response shape (later_acts/sessions_checked/ later_acts_merged_into_text: false/the “never rewrite text” rule), the baked-index + KV injection pattern (append new exports to the SAME src/<xx>-index-data.ts file the catchline index already uses — one file per pack slug in pack-baked-indexes.json, not a second registry entry), the session-discovery-over-hardcoding trick (read the live <select> rather than a fixed session list, so the index self-extends as new sessions are held), and the scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs → scripts/<xx>-later-acts-refresh.yml shape for the refresh workflow.

Known gaps

• ar_search matches official catchlines only, not full statutory text — fetching all 28 multi-MB title pages per query is not viable. A topic discussed inside a section’s body but absent from its catchline will not be found.
• Every response is explicitly dated to Release 78 (2020-11-06). A pre-r78 (or pre-2012) version of a section’s text is not published anywhere free that was found.

Refreshing the baked indexes

src/ar-index-data.ts carries TWO independently-baked tables, both injected from KV via workers/gateway/src/pack-baked-indexes.json as one combined _bakedIndex object rather than bundled (fleet #2754: a value-imported multi-MB table loads into every gateway isolate whether or not it ever serves this pack):

• AR_SECTIONS/AR_TITLES — ar_search’s catchline index, 37,369 rows across 28 titles. Rebuild with node scripts/bake-index.mjs > src/ar-index-data.ts (OVERWRITES the file — see below). Re-run only if unicourt.github.io/cic-code-ar publishes a release newer than 78.
• AR_LATER_ACTS/AR_LATER_ACTS_SESSIONS_CHECKED — ar_statute’s overlay index (fleet #2906), ~8,900 rows across the 12 sessions held since 2020-11-06. Rebuild with node scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs >> src/ar-index-data.ts (APPENDS). Re-run after every Arkansas legislative session adjourns and Acts are signed — see .github/workflows/arkansas-later-acts-refresh.yml for the scheduled version. Session discovery is automatic (reads the live <select> on arkleg.state.ar.us/Acts/SearchByRange), so a new session shows up with no code change.

Full regen (both tables):

node scripts/bake-index.mjs > src/ar-index-data.ts
node scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs >> src/ar-index-data.ts

Run node ../../scripts/check-baked-indexes.mjs after either (from the repo root) — it dynamically imports the regenerated file the same way the KV uploader does, and refuses an empty exported array before it ever reaches deploy.

Tools

• ar_statute — Get the TEXT of a section of the Arkansas Code (Ark. Code Ann.) by citation — state statutes, e.g.
• ar_search — Search the Arkansas Code BY TOPIC or keyword over official section catchlines (section titles), not