EU Law Lookup API (EUR-Lex): article text, in force, amendments

One call answers "what does Article 50 of the AI Act say today, is it in force, and what amended it?": the article as plain text from the current consolidated version (or the one in force on any date), the act's in-force status and dates, and the acts that amend, correct or repeal it. A second mode lists new acts in the Official Journal L series. Built for AI agents doing legal and compliance work, and for people who want a sourced answer without SPARQL.

Pricing (pay per event): $0.01 per act or article returned (act-lookup). A citation that can't be read, or an article that doesn't exist, fails in seconds and costs nothing.

Questions agents ask

• “What does Article 50 of the AI Act require today, and has it been amended? Quote the text and link the source.”

What you get

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Add this URL to your MCP client (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, ...) to load the Actor as a tool through the Apify hosted MCP server. It signs you in with OAuth or accepts Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>. It works once the Actor is live on the Apify Store.

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=bosco_labs/eu-law-lookup

For “What does Article 50 of the AI Act require today, and has it been amended? Quote the text and link the source.” the agent passes:

{ "query": "AI Act", "article": "50" }

small JSON rows (typically 5-20 KB), stable snake_case fields, ISO dates, null for unknown, a EUR-Lex link for the act, the text version and every related act. warnings says in plain words when a fallback was used (another language, the OJ text instead of a consolidated version) or the act was not in force on asOf. A lookup takes about 1 second after start-up (measured 0.6-0.7 s for GDPR Art. 5 and AI Act Art. 50).

Or call the Apify API: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/bosco_labs~eu-law-lookup/run-sync-get-dataset-items with the input as JSON body. Cost: $0.01 per act or article returned.

HTTP API

Also on the Bosco Labs HTTP API (beta, test mode): same input and same rows as the Actor, $0.005 per act or article returned from prepaid credits (max 50 results (maxResults) per call). Get a key with a $0.50 free trial; see prices and limits.

curl https://api.boscolabs.dev/v1/eu-law-lookup \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BOSCO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "AI Act", "article": "50"}'

Consolidated texts from EUR-Lex (© European Union) are a documentation tool with no legal effect; only the acts published in the Official Journal of the European Union are authentic.

Input fields

Sources, licence and limits

Where does the data come from? Only from the Publications Office of the EU, the publisher of EUR-Lex: its Cellar repository (SPARQL endpoint for metadata and relations, REST content negotiation for texts). Nothing else is added, and the text is not rewritten or summarised.

Is the consolidated text the law? No. Consolidated versions are, in EUR-Lex's own words, "a documentation tool" with no legal effect; only the texts published in the Official Journal are authentic. Every row with a consolidated text carries EUR-Lex's disclaimer in text_notice and links the authentic act in eur_lex_url. Ask with an asOf before the first consolidated version to get the OJ text itself.

Is this legal advice? No. It returns official texts and metadata as published; it does not interpret them. EUR-Lex itself states its information is not professional or legal advice.

Which acts work? Any act with a CELEX number in EUR-Lex: regulations, directives and decisions, corrigenda and consolidated versions. Article extraction works on all current texts; for some old acts (before about 2000) only an HTML text without article markup exists, and the last article may then include trailing headings. Annexes are not split out (use include: ["text"]).

How current is it? Live: every call reads Cellar directly. New OJ acts appear the day they are published; consolidated versions follow when the Publications Office produces them (days to weeks), so latest_consolidated_version_date can lag behind amended_by. in_force can be null for acts published in the last few days, before EUR-Lex has set it.

Why is a title null? Some corrigenda have no title in Cellar, and very new acts may not yet have one in every language.

Points like 6(1)(a)? The paragraph is returned whole; points are lines inside it.

Personal data? None is requested or returned beyond what the published legal acts contain. Signatory names in the metadata are not output.

Content: © European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu (reuse under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU; consolidated texts and editorial content under CC BY 4.0; metadata CC0). Text is converted from XHTML to plain text and long texts are cut where maxTextChars says; nothing else is changed.