Jurisdiction Detection is an AGPL-3.0+ licensed specification designed to provide a reusable jurisdiction intelligence layer for legal AI, compliance systems, government applications, real estate technology, legal research platforms, and other location-aware software. The specification determines the jurisdictions associated with a user-provided location and structures that information so downstream systems can apply the appropriate legal, regulatory, governmental, or procedural rules.
The specification provides core capabilities for user-provided location analysis, location normalization, city identification, county identification, state identification, and federal jurisdiction analysis. It can recognize municipalities and geographic boundaries while accounting for situations where a mailing address, municipality, county, and other geographic jurisdictions do not perfectly align. It is designed to represent jurisdictional relationships rather than reducing a location to a single geographic label.
A major feature is multi-jurisdiction overlap detection. A single location may simultaneously fall within a municipality, county, state, federal judicial district, special district, or other jurisdiction. Jurisdiction Detection provides a structured hierarchy for representing these relationships and can identify overlapping or conflicting jurisdictional information. Boundary recognition, historical boundary support, confidence assessment, source provenance, and ambiguity handling can help applications distinguish reliable determinations from situations requiring additional verification.
The specification also provides jurisdiction-specific legal filtering, allowing downstream legal systems to use detected jurisdictions when determining which laws, regulations, courts, agencies, filing requirements, or other legal resources should be considered. Importantly, the specification separates jurisdiction detection from legal interpretation, making it an infrastructure layer rather than an automated legal-advice system.
Jurisdiction Detection uses a modular architecture. Core modules provide the fundamental location and jurisdiction capabilities, while optional plugin modules can add court jurisdiction mapping, GIS integrations, parcel boundaries, property-tax jurisdictions, school districts, special districts, tribal jurisdictions, federal lands, historical jurisdiction analysis, international jurisdictions, government data connectors, legal database connectors, human review, audit and provenance, APIs, and other specialized functionality. This allows the specification to remain focused while supporting expansion into increasingly sophisticated legal and geographic applications.
All specifications are released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0+) and may be used free of charge with the required attribution under Section 7 of the license. Organizations that require attribution-free commercial deployment may obtain a Specification Branding License (SBL). Licensing fees are determined based on the specific specification, deployment scope, and the scale of the network or environment in which it is deployed.
Specification Repository:
- RightGuide – An open-source AI-powered legal analysis platform that helps users understand applicable laws, identify potential legal issues, locate reporting agencies, and discover legal resources based on jurisdiction-specific regulations.
Premium Module Specifications:
Jurisdiction Detection Specification Pricing:
| Network Size | # of Users | One-Time Price | Duration |
| Small | 1 – 20 | Custom Quote | Perpetual License |
| Medium | 21- 1000 | Custom Quote | Perpetual License |
| Large | 1001 + | Custom Quote | Custom Quote |
