Knowledge Bases for trustworthy African legal AI
Query legislation and case law for search, RAG, legal agents and workflow tools. Laws.Africa handles ingestion, indexing and updates so your product can retrieve the legal context it needs.
What is a Knowledge Base?
A Knowledge Base is a searchable legal collection for a particular place and content type, such as national legislation, municipal by-laws or court judgment information. Query it with keywords or AI-generated search text, and Laws.Africa returns the most relevant legal data.
When you use the Knowledge Base retrieve API, Laws.Africa runs text and semantic search across the collection, finds the best matching portions of documents, and returns those results with rich metadata.
- Use Knowledge Bases for RAG, LLM agents, legal search and workflow tools.
- Retrieve legal context without managing source documents, chunks, embeddings or indexes yourself.
- Return matching legal content with citations, metadata and public URLs so users can inspect the source.
- Choose between Legislation and Judgment Knowledge Bases for different countries.
What Knowledge Bases return
Legislation Knowledge Bases
- Relevant portions of legislation, such as sections, chapters or schedules.
- Title, FRBR URI, place, expression date and public links.
Best when your product needs current legislative context for search, legal agents or AI grounding.
Judgments Knowledge Bases
- Judgment summaries and flynotes.
- Case title, place and public links.
Helps your application surface relevant case law context.
How Knowledge Bases fit into an app
1. Ask
A user asks a legal question, starts a workflow, or triggers an agent tool call.
2. Retrieve
Your application sends a search query and optional filters. The Knowledge Base returns the most relevant legal portions or summaries.
3. Ground
Your product passes results, citations and public URLs into a search interface, RAG pipeline or model context.
Common use cases
Legal AI assistants
Answer user questions with legal context that can be cited and checked.
Legal search
Search legislation or case law without building your own indexing pipeline.
Research triage
Surface the most relevant legislation or judgments at the start of a question, matter or review.
Available Knowledge Bases
- Knowledge Base: Ghana - Judgments (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Ghana - Legislation (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Namibia - Judgments (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Namibia - Legislation (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: South Africa - Judgments (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: South Africa - Legislation (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Tanzania - Judgments (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Tanzania - Legislation (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Uganda - Judgments (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Uganda - Legislation (Preview)
- Knowledge Base: Zambia - Legislation (Preview)
Knowledge Bases or the Content API?
Use Knowledge Bases when
- you need search, retrieval or AI grounding;
- you do not need to store full legislation collections locally;
- you want a fast integration path with lower operational burden.
Use the Content API when
- you need full text collections in your own system;
- you need XML, HTML, PDF, metadata or point-in-time versions;
- you are building publishing, compliance or offline processing infrastructure.
Start building with Knowledge Bases
Experiment for free, query maintained legal collections, and add trustworthy legal grounding to your product.
Start for free Developer documentation