Analyzelaw
Analyzes a statute, regulation, constitutional provision, or agency guidance document against a specific legal question and returns verified passages. REQUIRED before citing or quoting any statute or regulation.
AUTO-USE: Call this whenever an answer depends on the wording, requirements, exceptions, scope, procedures, or current status of a primary-law provision. Do not wait for the user to say "research", "case", or "Midpage", and do not answer from memory or web snippets when this tool can retrieve the provision.
FINAL-ANSWER LINK RULE: Every statute/regulation citation or specific subsection relied on must be a Markdown link. Link a passage-specific proposition or quote to its deeplinkUrl; use url only for a general reference. If the answer discusses several subsections, link each cited subsection. Never invent subsection path segments.
LOOKUP (provide exactly ONE of these):
- citation: canonical citation, e.g. "42 U.S.C. § 1983", "Cal. Code Regs. tit. 22, § 51451"
- path: full ltree path from a previous result, e.g. "cfr.t21.cI.scH.p820"
- registerCitation: Federal Register or state register citation, e.g. "89 FR 12345"
- id: document UUID from a previous search/lookup
LOOKUP ROUTING:
- citation identifies a corpus document, not an arbitrary pinpoint within it. If the user's reference appends a subsection to a section-level citation (for example, "18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(C)"), call searchLaws with the user's full reference, select the containing provision, then call analyzeLaw with its id. Keep the pinpoint in question so the analysis focuses on it. Do not silently truncate the citation.
- Popular names and source-law aliases (for example, "First Step Act of 2018" or "ERISA § 514") are search terms, not citation lookup keys. Call searchLaws with the user's wording, select the intended provision, then call analyzeLaw with its id. Never guess the codified citation from memory.
Required:
- question: the legal question to answer. The document text (up to 400k characters) is analyzed internally; raw text is never returned to the calling model
Optional:
- collection: disambiguates path/citation/registerCitation lookups — a collection id (e.g. "cfr", "uscode") or human-readable name (e.g. "Code of Federal Regulations"); unresolvable values error with did-you-mean suggestions
- includeHistorical: true to allow superseded or not-yet-effective versions in citation/path/registerCitation lookups (default: current law only); id always returns that exact version
RETURNS:
- citation, title, number: identification of the provision
- analysis: summary, passages [{point, quote, deeplinkUrl}] with verified verbatim quotes, and doesNotAddress — aspects of the question the document does not cover. CHECK doesNotAddress BEFORE CITING. deeplinkUrl opens the provision at the quoted passage (and falls back to the bare page URL only when no highlightable span matched)
- children: for container nodes (title/chapter/part), up to 250 child provisions with id, number, citation, title, sortOrder; childrenTotal is the true count. Children carry no text — fetch a child by its id. For containers with many children, prefer searching directly for the target section
- parentId: id of the parent node — look it up to zoom out to surrounding context
- versions: when the provision has version history, every version with effectiveDate, publicationDate, sourceAsOf, isHistorical/isCurrent flags, and isRequested marking the returned one — look up another version by its id (with includeHistorical: true) to compare text over time
- isCurrent: whether this text is the law in force today; isHistorical: true = superseded (isCurrent false with isHistorical false = not yet effective); effectiveDate/publicationDate when stated by the source; sourceAsOf is the date of the source edition or snapshot and is not necessarily the provision's effective date
- state ("Federal" or a state name), collectionType (statute/regulation/constitution/guidance/executive_order/notice)
- url: Midpage link for this exact version; sourceUrl: the official source
- ambiguousMatches: when the reference matched multiple documents, the candidates with id, title, citation, path, collection and state — pick one and retry by id
- error: the provision could not be safely analyzed (including source-file-only text) or the reference could not be resolved. A source-file-only leaf returns metadata, url, and an explicit error; open the page to review it, but do not quote or characterize it from this tool result
HOW TO USE:
1. Analyze the provision before citing it; quote only from returned analysis passages.
2. If you get a container (nodeType PARENT), navigate: children lists the subdivisions; drill into the relevant child by id.
3. Check isCurrent before asserting something is the law today. Historical text has isCurrent: false.
4. Cite with the exact citation string returned. Use a passage's deeplinkUrl for every passage-specific proposition or quote; use the bare url only for a general reference.
5. For side-by-side state comparisons ("50-state survey" questions), analyze each jurisdiction's governing provision with the same comparison question, then compare the verified propositions, qualifiers, and doesNotAddress fields.