# BLAD: A Historically Contextualized, Multilingual Dataset of Bangladeshi Legal Acts (1799 to 2025)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17111 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17111/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [LEXTREME: A Multi-Lingual and Multi-Task Benchmark for the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13126/) (2023)
- [MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02069/) (2023)
- [A Multi-Task Benchmark for Korean Legal Language Understanding and Judgement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05224/) (2022)
- [Natural Language Processing for the Legal Domain: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, Models, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21306/) (2024)
- [IL-TUR: Benchmark for Indian Legal Text Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05399/) (2024)
- [Exploring Possibilities of AI-Powered Legal Assistance in Bangladesh through Large Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17210/) (2024)
- [A visual search engine for Bangladeshi laws](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05233/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the Bangladesh Legal Acts Dataset (BLAD), a curated collection of 1{,}484 legislative acts enacted between 1799 and 2025. Each act is represented with its full text, structured sections and footnotes, repeal status, and metadata linking it to the governing regime, head of state, and prevailing legal framework at the time of enactment. The corpus spans English, Bengali, and mixed-language documents, supporting temporal and multilingual analysis of statutory law. BLAD addresses a persistent gap in legal natural language processing (NLP) resources for low-resource, civil-law jurisdictions in South Asia. We describe the acquisition and enrichment pipeline, report descriptive statistics over more than two centuries of legislation, and outline the research directions the corpus enables. The dataset is publicly available under the CC~BY-SA~4.0 license at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sakhadib/bangladesh-legal-acts-dataset.