About

Plain Text Law is a plain-text mirror of statutory law. It has no images, minimal JavaScript, and minimal CSS, on purpose: not everything needs a design system. This exists to be read by people and easily parsed by machines, nothing more.

Content is fetched from https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Laws/Statutes on a regular schedule and rebuilt from scratch each time. There is no guarantee this mirror is accurate, current, or complete. It is a best-effort copy, not a substitute for the official source, and should not be relied on for legal advice.

Sources and Reuse

Two layers make up this site, and they carry different rights.

The law itself — the statutory text — is public domain. No one owns it, including us. Copy it, quote it, republish it, feed it to a model, build a product on it. No permission needed, no attribution required, no license of any kind applies to it, because none is possible.

The specific HTML and XML on this site — the markup, structure, and any labels or metadata we add — is our own work product. We release it under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0). You can copy it, modify it, and republish it, including commercially, as long as you credit plaintextlaw.com and license whatever you build with it under the same terms. That second condition is the point: it keeps this material, and anything built on top of it, open for the next person too.

Where this comes from

The statutory text on this site is mirrored from the Maryland General Assembly's official, unannotated Code (mgaleg.maryland.gov). It is government edict material under U.S. copyright law and belongs to no one. Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 140 S. Ct. 1498 (2020); Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888).

What we deliberately left out

This site does not include annotations from any commercially published version of the Maryland Code (Michie's or West's Annotated Code of Maryland), and it does not include commercial reporter headnotes, syllabi, or key-number classifications. That editorial content is added by private publishers and can carry its own copyright, separate from the uncopyrightable statute it surrounds. What you see here is the underlying statute text itself.

Accuracy

This is an unofficial mirror. We update it daily from the official source, but if you need a copy for a court filing or any purpose requiring certification, use the official source directly: mgaleg.maryland.gov.

What the license does and does not cover

The CC-BY-SA license above applies only to our markup, structure, and added labels. It does not, and cannot, extend any rights to the underlying statutory text, because that text was never ours to license. If you strip our HTML and XML away and take only the legal text itself, no license applies to you at all, because none is needed. If you take our formatting, structure, or added metadata along with it, the license terms above apply to that part.