Temporal legal state for Bosnia and Herzegovina

What this is for

Somebody with a real case needs to know what applied to them, when, and where that came from. A worker. The lawyer or accountant advising them. An inspector.

That is the aim, and it is worth saying plainly rather than disowning. A project that only ever retrieves text is not a reason to do this.

The pilot, which is deliberately smaller

Give the system a rule, a date and a jurisdiction. Can it return the text that applied then, name the act and the gazette issue it came from, and say when it was retrieved?

That is the first step that can be measured, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is still not obviously possible, which is why it comes first. It is not legal advice and it is not a chatbot. The pilot is narrow so that it can be wrong in a way somebody can check.

The part that connects the two

Going from "here is the text" to "here is what applies to you" is not a chatbot problem. The worked example in the survey is where that became clear.

Asked how many days of annual leave a worker gets, the Federation Labour Law fixes a floor of 20 working days, allows more than 30 where a collective agreement provides for it, and then hands the actual figure to three documents: a collective agreement, an employer rulebook, and the contract itself. None of them is in any gazette. The last one is not public at all.

So the answer the law supports is not a number. It is:

• the bound the statute does fix, cited to the article and the version that applied on the date asked about;
• the named documents that would decide the rest, each with where it would have to come from and whether it is obtainable;
• the facts the question did not supply - jurisdiction, sector, employer, length of service, age - and which of them would change the answer.

Naming what is missing is a real answer. It is the one a competent person gives, and unlike a number it can be checked. Producing it is in scope. Producing a confident figure is not, and the survey explains why.

Why it is not obvious

Laws here are published inside numbered gazette issues, not as individually addressable documents. Outside Brčko District, a consolidated current text is usually not an official act at all. It is a working aid, and the better publishers label it that way. So "the current text of the law" is, officially, not something you can fetch. It is something somebody reconstructed.

The state's own drafting rules make a second point that matters more than it sounds. An act must state when it enters into force and, separately, when it begins to apply. Two dates, deliberately different, with an official sentence for saying so.

Current stage

Researching.

The source landscape was surveyed once, on 2026-09-15, and the survey is honest about what it could not reach. Four things exist since:

• The question box. Ask in your own words is the front door, and it is the one a person with a problem can actually use: the other two tools ask for the name of an act or for thirty fields, and somebody looking for the law has neither. It takes a sentence. There is no table of questions behind it and nowhere for one to be added — a question is folded into the same letters the titles are folded into, words that reach more than half the register are discarded as too broad, and what comes back is the acts the surviving words reach WITH THE WORD THAT REACHED EACH ONE, so the reader can see why and judge it. Every act in the register is reachable by its own title, which is tested over all 769 rather than a sample -- and over every one of them the act has to come back as an ANSWER, not as a passing mention of its own name.
• The engine. A first working version holds seven articles of the Federation Labour Law and seven of the state drafting rules, answers six example questions, and reaches all four of the verdicts the business engine uses. The same question gives the same bytes.
• The bench. The reading bench puts the engine behind a form. Anybody can supply a provision and their reading of it and watch what follows. It holds no law, stores nothing and fetches nothing.
• The register. The register is a demo, and it now holds two of the four places this country legislates: 199 acts of Brčko District and 570 of the Federation of BiH, 1747 gazette entries between them, 1996 to 2026, 405 of the acts amended at least once and 45 carrying an official consolidated text. It holds citations, not legal text, and every entry links to the publisher's own document. Give it a year and it computes which issues had been published by then and which one carried the readable text - arithmetic, identical for all 769 acts, and it stops before claiming anything was in force.

Brčko was read first on findings rather than convenience: it is the one jurisdiction where a consolidated text is an official act, and the one publishing its whole register free. The Federation came second because it is the largest body of law anybody here lives under that can be read without paying for it: thirty-one year registers, 1996 to 2026, 1165 rows, 1096 of them read. What that source does not do is gather an act's amendments into one place, so the chain is assembled here out of the rows' own titles -- and 69 of the acts turn out to be older than the register that holds them, which the arithmetic says rather than hides.

The country legislates in four places, and the register says so on every page. The state, the Federation, Republika Srpska and Brčko District each have a register here. Two of them carry acts. The other two carry one sentence each, in every language this site publishes, naming the publisher and the obstacle: a subscription and a login at the state gazette; a subscription plus Dikta at the Republika Srpska publisher, which is a paid product whose job is answering exactly this question. A register with no acts and no reason is refused when the data loads, so a jurisdiction cannot go quietly missing. This matters more than it sounds: "no such law" and "we cannot read that publisher for free" are different sentences, and a tool that says the first when the second is true is worse than no tool.

No text has been ingested in bulk, no legal corpus exists, and no pilot has been approved.

The first evaluation round is open

Whether the engine is right is not a question this project can answer about itself. Twenty questions you expect it to get wrong is the invitation to three to five people who read law professionally, and the rules the result will be scored by - written before anything has been sent, including the two failure classes that would end the project rather than shrink it.

The open piece of work is the one v1 refuses to do: placing a text in time. The engine holds one copy of each act and does not know when that copy was the law, because no source surveyed publishes the two dates in a form a machine can read.

What would make this stop

Two things would end the project rather than shrink it.

• A baseline that is already good enough. If a person with a search box gets to the same answer as fast, there is nothing here.
• An error rate that cannot be driven low enough to be safe. A wrong date on a legal rule is worse than no date.

Republication was the third, and it is settled: official texts carry no copyright, so the text of an act may be reproduced. What remains is the database maker's right, which reaches a *collection* - so a corpus gets built by people entering provisions, not by taking somebody's holdings. The provisions, quoted.

Each of the two above is a real outcome, and this page will say so if one of them happens.

Published under this project

• Research proposal 15 September 2026revised 16 September 2026, version 7

  What a legal rule said on a given date, in Bosnia and Herzegovina

  A proposal, and the survey of official sources that argues against most of it. Bosnian drafting rules require two separate dates on every act; outside Brčko a consolidated current text is not an official act; and the practical question people ask is answered not by a number but by naming which documents and which facts are still missing.

• Methodology 15 September 2026revised 16 September 2026, version 3

  Twenty questions you expect it to get wrong

  The first evaluation round for the legal engine, and the rules it will be judged by. We are not asking whether people like it. We are asking people who read law for a living to send the questions they expect it to fail, and we will publish how many of them it failed and in which of five ways.

• Project update 15 September 2026revised 16 September 2026, version 3

  A first working version of the legal engine

  X-Protocols already refuses to turn "we do not hold that" into "no". We built a separate engine that applies the same refusal to Bosnian law, and asked it how much annual leave a worker gets. It answers with the floor the statute fixes, the three documents that decide the rest, and the facts nobody supplied.

• Research note 15 September 2026revised 16 September 2026, version 3

  May Bosnian legal text be republished?

  Official texts of Bosnian legislation carry no copyright, so the text of a law may be republished. The constraint that remains is the database maker's right, which protects somebody's collection even when every document in it is free - and that is what decides how a corpus here has to be built.