I hadn't thought of using git to track the changes in legislation. This is a cool idea.
In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation.
So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean.
"A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.
It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.
Cool idea but I can't find anywhere on the linked page to try it? It reads like a neat concept but it's not clear if this is a thing they've actually made or not (or am I just missing something super obvious?)
I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.
Likewise, a younger, more idealistic me thought it'd be great to use a GitHub-esque platform for laws. Pull Requests to suggest laws, gated behind reviews/approvals, branches so each house could work on their own versions before finally reconciling and merging into the Code, literally.
I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post some of that context.
YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to appear and hope they share the torrent...
Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.
> natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies
The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.
The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.
I see. The laws are completely different from my country, so this is very educational. My country uses civil law, but I see that is how it is under common law. Thank you very much.
Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be responsible for.
If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.
Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation. So who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest
That’s like saying that the code in a repo belongs to the whole team once a PR is merged, so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors.
> so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors
The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.
At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)
In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation.
So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean.
"A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
French bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
"Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May 2014 (0 comments)
It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.
I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.
Version control for the public parts will make both public and secretive law-drafting better.
The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.
The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.
If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.
This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill is a law, it's the will of the Congress.
The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.
At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)