Add error handling for missing or malformed legal_sections.json

[aryantripathi130306-droid]

Pull Request

Description

This PR adds proper error handling in _load_legal_sections() for cases where legal_sections.json is missing or contains malformed JSON.

Previously, the application raised generic Python exceptions without providing meaningful feedback.

Changes Made

• Added handling for FileNotFoundError
• Added handling for json.JSONDecodeError
• Prevented unexpected application crashes
• Improved error reporting using logging

Before

• Application crashed with generic Python errors when:
  • legal_sections.json was missing
  • JSON format was invalid

After

• Application now handles these cases gracefully
• Clear error messages are logged instead of unhandled exceptions

Testing

Tested the following scenarios:

• Missing legal_sections.json
• Invalid/malformed JSON content
• Verified application no longer crashes unexpectedly

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
nyaysetu	Ready	Preview, Comment	May 26, 2026 9:15am

[viru0909-dev]

Thanks for the contribution, @aryantripathi130306-droid!

The error handling fix for _load_legal_sections() is a solid improvement — wrapping it in try/except for FileNotFoundError and json.JSONDecodeError prevents the NLP service from crashing when the data file is missing or malformed. Good catch!

However, your branch was forked from an older version of main, which caused 25 merge conflicts across unrelated files. To avoid these conflicts, I've cherry-picked your fix onto a clean branch from the latest main and merged it with credit to you.

For future contributions, please make sure to rebase your branch on the latest main before opening a PR:

git fetch upstream main
git rebase upstream/main