A plain-English reading room for federal documents.
GovernmentReporter makes federal documents readable for people who don’t have legal training. Every document gets a short plain-English summary. Every question asked in the chat is answered from the text of the document itself, with the passages cited.
Three reading rooms
- SCOTUS Reporter — Search US Supreme Court opinions, read plain-English summaries and holdings, and ask questions answered from the opinion text.
- Executive Order Reporter — Read federal executive orders with plain-English summaries and context on what the order directs.
- Legislation Reporter — Follow Congressional bills that have moved past committee, with plain-English summaries and status tracking.
What you can do here
- Read short, plain-English summaries. Every document leads with a readable summary so you know what it says before you read it.
- Search by meaning. Describe what you’re looking for in your own words. Results are ranked by meaning, not just keyword match.
- Ask questions of a specific document. The chat answers from the text of that document and cites the passages it drew from, so you can read them yourself.
Why not just ask a general chatbot?
General-purpose chatbots are useful, but they have two problems when you’re trying to understand a specific federal document.
They’re often out of date. GovernmentReporter ingests new documents nightly, so you can read opinions, orders, and bills as soon as they’re published.
They’re not reading the document. When you ask a question here, the entire document is placed into the model’s context. The answer comes from the text in front of it, with the passages cited. That makes the answer more accurate and verifiable.
Where the data comes from
- Supreme Court opinions — CourtListener API.
- Executive order metadata — Federal Register API, with full text from the GovInfo API.
- Congressional bills — Congress.gov API.
Data is refreshed nightly.
A note on the limits
This site is for general understanding of what federal documents say. It is not legal advice, and it won’t tell you what the law is in your jurisdiction. For legal questions that affect you personally, talk to a lawyer.
Contact
GovernmentReporter is created by Shane Orr. Questions or feedback: shane@governmentreporter.ai.