About
A reference atlas of the world's legal systems
LawLegiance maps how law is actually organised in every sovereign state: which courts sit where, which bodies hold which powers, and what a person has to do to get something done.
What this is
Legal information online tends to arrive in two unhelpful shapes: national sources that assume you already know the system you are in, and global summaries so broad they cannot be acted on. This atlas sits between them. It records the structure of each legal system — its tradition, its courts, its government bodies, its procedures and its forms — in a consistent shape, so that one jurisdiction can be read against another without first learning two vocabularies.
Every one of the 195 sovereign states recognised by UN membership has a page. Coverage beyond that baseline is uneven and the atlas says so on every record rather than averaging it away.
- Sovereign states indexed
- 195
- Courts mapped
- 532
- Legal topics tracked
- 18
- Records marked reviewed
- 4,119
Two tiers of coverage, always labelled
Pretending to uniform depth across 195 legal systems would be the fastest way to make this atlas untrustworthy. Instead every jurisdiction sits in one of two states, and the state is shown on the record itself:
Documented
Researched end to end
Topic-level treatment with named statutes, institutions, deadlines and procedure. These jurisdictions carry the full fifteen-section portal.
Indexed
Verified structural facts
Legal tradition, capital, government type, population, official languages and currency — accurate, but no topic-level rules yet. The page says so plainly instead of showing empty sections.
The distinction is enforced in the product, not just described here: the research assistant is given both tiers and is not permitted to present indexed structural data as though it were researched topic guidance.
Who it is for
- Practitioners working across borders who need to orient quickly in an unfamiliar system.
- Researchers and students comparing how different traditions solve the same problem.
- Journalists and policy staff who need the institutional map right before writing about it.
- People handling their own matter who need to know which body to approach and in what order.
What it is not
- Not legal advice. Nothing here is tailored to your facts, and reading it creates no professional relationship.
- Not a substitute for primary law. Where a statute or court is named, go to the official source before relying on it.
- Not a case-law database. The atlas maps institutions and procedure, not judgments.
- Not always current. Law changes faster than any atlas. Records carry a review date so you can judge staleness.
Corrections are the point
An atlas of this size is wrong somewhere right now. If you know a jurisdiction well and something here does not match it, telling us is the single most useful thing you can do. Every record carries a correction link, and submissions go to the editorial queue with your source attached.
Looking for the data behind the atlas? See API and licensing options.