Feed of changes to the session-law registry

A sync feed of the registry: every state law that began to be served, had its text added, was corrected, unserved, withdrawn or merged, oldest first, as a cursor over an integer id. Poll it to keep a copy of the registry current without re-listing it: read from sinceId=0 once, then call again with the cursor you were given.

Cost: 1 credit per page of up to 200 entries (default 50). An empty page is an answer, “nothing changed since your cursor”, and is charged. A request that fails validation (422) is never charged; a failure on our side (500, 503) is refunded.

Walking the feed. Send sinceId=0 for the first page. While hasMore is true, call again with sinceId set to cursor: the feed is ordered by id, id only grows, and a page carries the entries after sinceId and nothing else, so no entry is skipped or repeated between your calls. When hasMore is false you have caught up as of this call; keep your cursor and ask again later. An empty page has cursor: null: keep the one you hold.

What an entry says. kind is what happened (see its description), sessionLawId the law, jurisdiction its state, and detectedAt when we recorded it, an upper bound on when the law changed in the world and never an approval or effective date. Read the law itself at GET /us/session-laws/{sessionLawId}, or many at once with POST /us/session-laws/batch. A withdrawn or merged entry is a tombstone: the law no longer answers there.

Filter. jurisdiction limits the feed to one state, dc or pr, and then hasMore means more MATCHING entries follow. The cursor is a position in the whole feed, so the same sinceId means the same point with or without the filter, and a filtered page can skip ids.

Read a short window behind your cursor. id is assigned in order but a row can become visible slightly after a later one if two writers commit at once. Every writer today commits a whole batch together, so this has not happened, but a job that must never miss an entry should re-read the last few hundred ids it has already seen.

Scope. State session laws only: federal acts (SAL_...) are never in this feed.

Example

curl "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/changes?sinceId=0&limit=100" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

let cursor = 0;
for (;;) {
  const res = await fetch(`https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/session-laws/changes?sinceId=${cursor}`, {
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.VAQUILL_API_KEY}` },
  });
  const page = await res.json();
  for (const change of page.changes) handle(change);
  if (page.cursor !== null) cursor = page.cursor;
  if (!page.hasMore) break;
}

Related endpoints

• GET /us/session-laws/list lists the laws of one state, filtered; this feed is how you learn that one changed.
• POST /us/session-laws/batch reads many laws at once from the ids this feed returns.
• GET /us/statutes/coverage says which sessions we hold and how complete each is, in each jurisdiction’s sessionLaws block.

Nulls. Every field of a response is always present: one with no value is null (or [] for a list). The examples on this page leave the nulls out for brevity.