Invoket

Is this French law still in force? Ground the answer

An agent that reasons about French law needs the consolidated article text as it stood on a date, plus its in-force or repealed status — not a paraphrase from training data. One call returns both.

An agent that answers a question about French law cannot trust its own weights for it. Statutes are amended and repealed constantly, and an LLM’s recollection of an article is a paraphrase frozen at training time — wrong as soon as the text changes, and silent about when it was true. To reason correctly the agent needs the consolidated article text as it stood on a specific date plus its LEGI status (in force, repealed, …). One paid call — GET /legal/article — returns both, grounded in the official corpus.

The problem: a remembered statute is a stale statute

Ask a model for “Article 1240 of the Civil Code” and it will produce text that looks right. But it cannot tell you which version it is reproducing, whether that version was in force on the date your case turns on, or whether the article has since been repealed. French consolidated law is bulky, versioned, dated reference data published as the LEGI dataset by DILA — exactly the kind of corpus that does not belong in a model’s parameters and must be looked up against a known snapshot.

The question is also inherently date-scoped: “is this in force?” only means something relative to a date. An endpoint that resolves the right version for a date turns a vague recollection into a citable fact.

The call: consolidated text and status, for a date

GET /legal/article takes a code (e.g. code-civil), an article (e.g. 1240), and an optional date (defaults to today). It returns the version in force on that date:

FieldWhat the agent learns
textConsolidated text of the version in force on the date
etatLEGI status, carried as stored (vigueur, abroge, …)
dateThe effective resolution date
versionThe selected version’s id and validity window (date_debut/date_fin)
coverageWhether the store served an unambiguous version
GET /legal/article?code=code-civil&article=1240&date=2026-01-01

Omit date to get the version in force today. The version block is what makes the answer auditable: date_debut (inclusive) and date_fin (exclusive, omitted when current) bound exactly the window the returned text applies to.

Repealed is data, not an error

The honesty point that matters most for legal grounding: an abrogated article is still a 200. If the reference and the date are covered, the service returns the text and sets etat: "abroge" — it does not convert a repeal into a 404.

Per the x402 golden rule, the agent pays for the answer to its question. “This article was repealed as of this date” is a successful answer. The status lives in data.etat, never in the HTTP code. The 4xx range is reserved for questions the service genuinely cannot answer:

  • INVALID_REF / INVALID_DATE — the reference or date is malformed.
  • UNKNOWN_ARTICLE — the reference is well-formed but no such article exists.
  • NO_VERSION_AT_DATE — the article exists, but no version covers that date.

An agent must therefore read etat, not just the HTTP status: a clean 200 can still carry a repealed article that you must not cite as current law.

Coverage honesty: what it will not do

The endpoint answers from a local snapshot of the LEGI corpus (freshness.kind: "snapshot", with as_of the dump date). It deliberately does not fetch Legifrance at request time, search by keyword, infer missing articles, or reinterpret a LEGI status. etat is carried verbatim as legal metadata. coverage.complete: false is reserved for genuine source-store anomalies (e.g. overlapping versions), not for guessing — unknown articles and uncovered dates are 4xx, never a partial paid answer.

Where it sits in the x402 loop

Grounding is the lookup step before the agent commits to a legal statement. The loop:

  1. Discover the endpoint and call it; receive the 402.
  2. Pay — sign the chosen rail and replay the request.
  3. Resolve — read text, etat, and the version window.
  4. Branch — cite the text only when etat is in force for the date; flag a repealed or not-yet-in-force version; on NO_VERSION_AT_DATE, tell the user no version applied on that date rather than inventing one.

Each paid call follows the same x402 pattern as every Invoket endpoint. The Quickstart walks the whole discover → 402 → pay → replay cycle with runnable snippets. Price and accepted rails are not pinned in this article — they are served live by the catalog; see the endpoint reference for the current figure.

GET /legal/article answers “what did this article say, and was it in force, on this date?” The neighbouring endpoints answer the time-travel questions around it:

For a set of references — a contract’s cited articles, a compliance checklist — POST /legal/article/batch resolves many under one x402 settlement instead of one per reference.

Used for what it is — a grounded, date-scoped lookup of consolidated French law — GET /legal/article lets an agent quote a statute it can stand behind, with the in-force status attached. For the full field reference and error codes, see the GET /legal/article documentation; for how agents discover and call Invoket endpoints, see For agents.

French legislation data is derived from the LEGI dataset published by DILA on Legifrance under the Licence Ouverte / Etalab open licence.