18 ms·

Why isn't there a Google for the law?

371 points by vqc 10y ago

gioele 10y ago
There are plenty of sources for acts (many national and supra-national services [1]) and for US case law (Google Scholar). The _text_ of law alone is worthless. In very few cases you should search for keywords. The unsolved problem is that what is needed (and there are private systems that can do this) is the ability to make queries like In 2014 my only child was 17, my family lived in Italy but I worked most of my time in the UK; which version of the Italian child-care law applied to me at the time? In order to answer this query you need to: 1. Know all the text of all the acts out there at the Italian level, European level and supra-national level. 2. Find the main acts that deal with child-care law. 3. Find all the acts that modify those main acts (they could extend it duration, modify its content). 3b. Find all the acts that modify the acts that modify those main acts (maybe the extension has been repelled). 3c. Find all the acts that modify the acts that modify the acts that modify those main acts (I think the point is clear now) 4. Consolidate (merge) all these acts using the rules that were in place at the time of the enactment. This produces a tree of versions for each point in time, not just a single version. 5. Find all the judgments that reference any of these acts. 6. Highlight the points that have to do with the user query. Truth be told, having the raw text (point 1) is the easiest part. The rest is what is extremely complicated. Regardless of this, there are private systems in places that can perform this kind of queries (although in a very limited fashion: their idea of "the whole corpus of law" is extremely narrow). To make the life of implementers easier, markup formats like AkomaNtoso [2] or Oasis LegalDocumentML/LegalRuleML [3] are being used, sadly not enough. Making the corpus of the law accessible is an important first step. But the corpus alone is is not going to be much helpful. It may even be dangerous if the single texts are not cross-referenced with other relevant texts. Appeal to authority: I worked on versioning legal documents (bills, acts, judgments, etc) during my PhD. I also worked in the research group that shaped the early versions of AkomaNtoso. [1] IT: http://normattiva.it http://normattiva.it (ex NormeInRete) DE: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de EU: http://eur-lex.europa.eu http://eur-lex.europa.eu US-CA: http://legisweb.com http://legisweb.com [2] http://akomantoso.org http://akomantoso.org [3] http://www.legalxml.org/ http://www.legalxml.org/
- matt4077 10y ago
  I worked on a platform for EU law for about half a year and got quite deep into Akoma Ntoso. It's certainly the right direction but it was unfortunately extremely difficult to even get an overview of the status. The various websites felt dead and the documentation wasn't inspiring my confidence either – IIRC it was actually provided as a word document :). Plus, I just couldn't find anybody publicly using it. The EU parliament supposedly does, but they could never give me an answer why they weren't sharing it online (only .doc and .pdf).
  - ocky7 10y ago
    Apparently, the UN and some African countries also make use of Akoma Ntoso, but like you I've never seen it in practice. Open data is not provided well. For example, it is possible to get XML documents from the EU parliament, but you have to request access to their FTP server and it is a laborious process. I've met Monica Palmirani of Akoma Ntoso recently and she told me they have just launched a case law standard, and so they're still working on it. I'm actually amazed she hasn't burned out yet. Trying to get governments to play nice data-wise is i n c r e d i b l y hard.
    - oever 10y ago
      The case-law standard is called ECLI. It's used in a few countries and being rolled out in more. At least one Dutch news paper uses ECLI when referring to court cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECLI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECLI http://bo-ecli.eu/ http://bo-ecli.eu/ Dutch law and government publications are available as XML and ODF. The constitution: http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2008-07-15 http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2008-07-15 A publication about standards: https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2015-39782.html https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2015-39782.htm... Each article can be linked and documents referring to each article can be found as well. For example all known documents that link to article 5 (equality) of the constitution: http://linkeddata.overheid.nl/embedded/portal/spiegel-lijstweergave?juriconnect=jci1.3%3ac%3aBWBR0001840%26hoofdstuk%3d1%26artikel%3d1%26z%3d2008-07-15%26g%3d2008-07-15 http://linkeddata.overheid.nl/embedded/portal/spiegel-lijstw... The links are available as RDF. Currently work is underway to publish law as XML and RDF with ODF/PDF/HTML as secondary formats. This will allow embedding of data such as property lines, lists of medicines, reusable financial reports.
jarjoura 10y ago
In university I had full access to LexusNexus, of course it's not free, but you could literally find any obscure legal text written in the country's history, in the click of a button.
- sdegutis 10y ago
  I think the point is that Google "understands" what you mean even if you don't say it quite right, or use the right phrases or words, and that's especially needed when searching for legal rights and things where what you're looking for often uses completely obscure or weird language. From the article: > "However, most laws can only be searched using the dark-age, Lycos strategy—guess at keywords and hope—and it’s often necessary to pay for even that limited functionality."
- wfunction 10y ago
  It's "LexisNexis"... it's not referring to the nexus of a car company. :)
katpas 10y ago
This reminds me of the concepts written about here* basically trying to develop robust definitions for legal terms and objects so a question like 'what are my rights in X situation' could be answered accurately by a computer. *http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-symbolic-discourse-and-the-ai-constitution/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-sym...
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The issue with our system of justice is that it's too unfeeling and robotic. Everyone has an inherent sense of what's just, yet it takes at least 7 years of schooling and many difficult technical achievements to be allowed to participate in its implementation (beyond simply plucking suspects from the street). Making it computerized does not seem like the correct course of action. Human judges and juries are needed to fully evaluate the context and pass judgment. My personal preference would be to go toward a less rigid system of law, not one so rigid that computers could reliably enforce it.
  - nradov 10y ago
    When the law becomes less rigid that means that whoever happens to be in power at the time gets to decide on a whim what's legal or illegal. Historically that hasn't worked out very well.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      "Whoever happens to be in power" already decides what's legal or illegal. That's what being in power means. No one respects a piece of paper; power ultimately comes down to the ability to exert force to see the decrees of the powerful imposed. If this isn't underneath the covers somewhere, the power moves to someone who does have this ability. There's already a huge amount of finagling by powerful individuals and groups in our government, they just have a lot of pomp and circumstance to try to cover it up. Removing some of the formalities makes flexibility more accessible. Sure, you can spend the millions of dollars it takes to successfully lobby Congress if you're a big multinational corporation. If you're a niche concern, you're stuck. Everyone hates mandatory minimum sentences these days. They were put in for a lot of drug crimes in the late 80s-early 90s, and they result in a lot of unneeded incarcerations, not only costing the taxpayer a lot of money, but costing society, family, and community the participation and productivity of someone who would be much more beneficial outside than in. Because of our rigid legal traditions, mandatory minimums must be enforced regardless of circumstances. When you get down to the bottom of it, no matter what system of governance you have, you need its administrators to be benevolent and wise to get desirable outcomes. I believe that more local authorities are more able to make wise decisions because they not only know the area more intimately, but are more impacted by the outcomes. A far-off judge doesn't care if he sends 40% of the community to jail. A local judge does. This is kind of like being entitled to being judged by a jury of your peers. Peers know the cultural norms and the local expectations. High-powered attorneys sitting on a bench in Washington, D.C. may not.
maxboisvert 10y ago
We have free access to law with canlii.org in Canada.
- vqc 10y ago
  I'm not familiar at all with Canadian law. Does canlii.org provide statutes, regs, case law from every jurisdiction from the local level (cities/towns) up through the federal level? Is this a distinction that matters?
  - citeright 10y ago
    You can see CanLII's coverage here: https://www.canlii.org/en/databases.html https://www.canlii.org/en/databases.html.
    - vqc 10y ago
      That is magnificent. It seems to "end" at the province/territory level (*this is not a critique at all). How does lawmaking work at the city level?
      - a3camero 10y ago
        Cities pass "bylaws" that affect their municipality. In Canada municipalities are more limited in their lawmaking powers than cities in some other countries. Bylaws are hard to lookup and are city-specific.
- a3camero 10y ago
  It is free-ish. It's free to use but there are restrictive licensing terms that prevent anyone from building anything with it: http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html. My blog post on this topic: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ and https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/ https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/.
josto 10y ago
Judicata is a start. You can search California statutes and case law. But lexis and westlaw are the tools needed for serious research.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  My brother who is a lawyer said Westlaw and LexusNexus have the unfortunate problem of being 99.9% accurate but the original source material still sometimes needs to be pulled because of errors during import such as a dropped comma which can change entire meanings of a law.
cia48621793 10y ago
Because when we have Google for Law, lawyers are obsoleted.
eelliott 10y ago
As a lawyer I've thought a lot about this (and if anyone is working on this and wants to talk get in touch). There are two reasons: 1. Reasoning in law relies on complex language semantics, both in statute and case law. Take for example a court decision that says "in the circumstances of this case I do not agree that John v Doe applies". That can be expressed a million ways and I'm not sure our natural language processing can replace humans yet in this area. 2. There is a lot of copyright problems that need to be overcome. Companies like Lexis and Westlaw own the rights to a lot of decisions and even statutes and can paywall the . This is slowly changing however, for example in the UK recently the courts took back the rights to publish decisions.
- nawtacawp 10y ago
  It does not seem ethical to hold a person accountable for not following a law, if they do not have free access to read that law and the various ways the court has ruled to how that law should be applied.
  - eelliott 10y ago
    I agree entirely however law is like all professions where access to information is only half the equation, its application and interpretation is derived from extensive training and experience. So I'd argue that until we nail 'Google for the law', access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases
    - dispose13432 10y ago
      >access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases That itself is a problem, while we have public defense lawyers, we don't have public preventive lawyers (who I can call and ask if what I'm about to do is altogether legal and what can I do to avoid run-ins with the law).
      - Spivak 10y ago
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
Casetext is a startup working on that, at least for case law, which is the more difficult body to gain efficient access to in the US: https://casetext.com/ https://casetext.com/ I'm not associated with them at all, other than once emailing the founder best wishes.
- vqc 10y ago
  Casetext and Judicata are great companies working on searching through judicial opinions. There's a lot to be said about PACER and publishing state judicial opinions. Suffice it to say, those companies could probably save a lot of time on parsing and focus on other problems instead if judicial opinions were released with some structured information, e.g. party names and procedural posture. Open Law Library makes it possible for legislatures to, among other things, publish their laws in structured formats. One thing to consider is that on a day-to-day basis, an individual might be impacted more by city/county/state law than by federal law.
mtdewcmu 10y ago
It would be a good idea to make a wiki, since the laws themselves aren't very readable.
vqc 10y ago
Co-founder of Open Law Library here. Happy to answer any questions about what we're building, the law, and anything else people are interested to discuss.
- pryelluw 10y ago
  How can people (like me) contribute? The word Open makes me think you accept non-monetary contributions.
  - vqc 10y ago
    With respect to contributing code, the short answer is that we're not sure yet. There is certainly no shortage of code to write, but we want to make sure that we work with volunteers in the right way. For anyone that's interested in please reach out here or through the contact form on our website. I will personally respond to everyone. Other than writing code, we need advocates in and out of government who understand and believe in the value of free (as in freedom) and accessible laws. Contact your local, state, federal representative and let them know that free and accessible laws are important to you. Let them know that a system exists that can not only make this a possibility, but that it will also make their lives a lot easier. We would also love to hear about what you would want to build on top of computer-readable, always up-to-date laws that could programmatically alert you when something changed and let you diff against old versions of the law. E.g. a) internal annotations for civil servants that wouldn't immediately be obsolete once the legal code changed; and b) legal alert system for the part of the law you care about. We'll put together a form that makes it easier to collect this information!
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Aside from code, how are you gathering the laws themselves? Public libraries?
      - vqc 10y ago
        We get them directly from the source. Previous attempts at accomplishing our mission saw organizations scraping government websites and re-hosting the laws on prettier websites. The problem was that a) the laws were only as up-to-date as the law the governments made available (which, unfortunately, are not up-to-date at all) and b) the projects were not sustainable because no one pays to access the law and websites needed updating every time the law changed. Sites like these are potentially very harmful. They haven't been updated in years and people who stumble upon them and miss the fine print end up relying on laws that have long since changed. Because timeliness matters, the only way to guarantee that we get it is by working directly with the governments. So we build software into the law drafting, codifying, and publishing process that governments can really benefit from and enjoy using. The software changes the economics of codification and publication and permits publishing the laws freely and openly.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Anecdote, I was at Google in 2006 and there was (is?) a database of ideas that people shared that Google might pursue. As their motto was organize the world's information and make it easily accessible. I had gotten a ticket for obstructing the intersection (the "anti-congestion" law in California that sought to limit gridlock by making it illegal to enter an intersection that you couldn't exit before the other light changed). I was fighting it and wanted to find other cases that had been decided on this law[1]. The only way to do that was to go to the public library and look through their published volumes of decisions and cases. So I thought here is a really useful thing Google could do, it isn't even a hard problem, collect the decisions that the courts publish anyway, and just connect the ones that are about the same part of the code. Match a number, match a date. And very useful to people who are fighting cases. It saved me some time and money [2]. But the idea never made it past the discussion stage because, as I was counseled, doing that would take on "powerful interests" who would really fight back hard and Google didn't want to draw that level of scrutiny. It wasn't until Carl Malamude started attacking this problem in earnest[3] that it became clear to me what it means to take away a revenue stream from lawyers. [1] And learned this is called 'Sheparding' based on finding citations -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard's_Citations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard's_Citations [2] turns out there had been no case law on this particular law and lots of dismissals so I just entered a plea of not guilty at the clerk, and the court informed me a week before my trial date that the prosecution had declined to prosecute. [3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150726/23080731763/even-if-state-georgia-can-copyright-legal-annotations-should-it.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150726/23080731763/even-...
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  >I had gotten a ticket for obstructing the intersection (the "anti-congestion" law in California that sought to limit gridlock by making it illegal to enter an intersection that you couldn't exit before the other light changed). You monster. :)
  - diogenescynic 10y ago
    To be fair, there is a lot of traffic created from this problem--especially in the Financial District in San Francisco. Whereas NYC has those "don't block the box" signs and it seems like their drivers are much more aware of it.
Ericson2314 10y ago
Uh, the real question is "why isn't there git for the law".
- xiaq 10y ago
  Good point, laws will be much easier to search if they are stored in a revision controlled system in the first place. But I think that it is even harder than what Open Law Library is trying to do.
- Animats 10y ago
  There is at the Federal level.[1] It's XML-based. Here's an example of a bill in raw XML.[1] It displays in the form that a bill is printed.[2] The GPO even puts in the XML, "Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain." There's a change control system behind all this. Here's a history of a bill, again, in XML.[4] There are change transactions, which are also in XML, but they're not in this database. [1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata [2] view-source:https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS-114hconres106ih.xml https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS... [3] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS-114hconres106ih.xml https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS... [4] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/114/sres/BILLSTATUS-114sres99.xml https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/114/sres/BILLS...
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    Thank you! I was unaware of any of this. It is understanding that bills are patches, and thus the law works like darcs—patch-oriented rather than revision-oriented. Does this sound correct to you? I arrived at this conclusion asking people who know nothing about VCS, so something mighthave been lost in translation.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Yes, and no. Each bill is subject to revisions, but once it is passed, it is a single patch – you could imagine that each bill is a branch in git, developed in commits one after another, and then the latest status is squashed and merged.
nickjamespdx 10y ago
Has no one mentioned Ravel yet? https://www.ravellaw.com/search https://www.ravellaw.com/search
sfRattan 10y ago
Appropriate that this subject makes an appearance on HN so close to the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's suicide under duress and attack from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Making court documents more publicly accessible was one of Aaron's projects (circa 2008). He and project collaborators downloaded more than a million documents from the government's PACER electronic access system using public library terminals and attracted the attention of the FBI.[1] Part of the goal at the time was to uncover privacy violations in filed court documents that were legally a matter of public record but behind a lucrative, government administrated pay wall.[2] There is something important to be said for the social and moral importance of keeping the public record publicly accessible. The justification for these intermediaries to exist and extract rent from the cataloging of public information grows slimmer and slimmer, but cataloging and indexing everything in a common law (precedent based) system is tremendously expensive. I suspect that developing of an algorithm to usefully search the dense and interweaving web of judicial opinions, case history, written legislation, and jurisdictions in which all those elements apply/overlap/supersede each other is also a massive capital investment. It all does have to be paid for somehow, and I don't think how to fund is a settled question. Pay walls clearly have pernicious externalities (privacy violations go unnoticed; access to law is practically limited to professionals for whom the costs are a business expense). But I don't trust the state to properly fund or develop such a service through general tax either. Consider supporting the individuals in this thread who are working to make that sort of open information access in law a reality, and consider also who will seek rent from the finished service who will not. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER [2]: https://public.resource.org/crime/ https://public.resource.org/crime/
- chris_wot 10y ago
  The law is formed by the government and the judiciary and applies to everyone living in or visiting the State. It's entirely reasonable to require the State to pay for unfettered access to the law.
  - sfRattan 10y ago
    Just as it is entirely reasonable not to trust the state to do so either competently or altruistically.
dvdhnt 10y ago
> The reasons this problem exists are complex, but they boil down to the fact that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways computers can easily process, making it difficult to extract the valuable information they contain. I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand. Furthermore, I believe this ambiguity directly impacts the governed, causing them to be, in general, distrustful of most laws that do not affect them in an observable way. Making laws more digestible is only part of the solution; the "what" should be annotated with the "why". Otherwise, with so many decentralized cities in an already decentralized nation, fundamentally sound, universally-applicable legislation may be ignored due to stereotypes and generalizations. Whereas, documented and annotated legislation can be analyzed, duplicated, and modified to fit different environments around the country, or reasonably ignored on verifiable grounds.
- ksikka 10y ago
  > I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand. So true. A premise of this blog post is that laws need to be easier for computers to understand, but that's skipping a step: making laws easy for humans to understand. I really like what TLDRLegal did: made software licenses digestible by humans. I would love to see similar sites pop up for other verticals of the law, but it's a lot of work and there's not much incentive to get it done at the quality-level of TLDRLegal.
  - dvdhnt 10y ago
    I had to note I also enjoy TLDRLegal... I wish they'd open an API.
drdeadringer 10y ago
I remember when Google Patent was around. My uncle and cousin found it very useful as patent lawyers on both ends of the experience spectrum. When it got shut down they were disappointed.
- arthurcolle 10y ago
  Google Patent shut down? Whaaat
  - loqwe 10y ago
    https://patents.google.com/ https://patents.google.com/
    - lgas 10y ago
      It has risen.
igurari 10y ago
The premise of this blog post is a little off base. (Though I think Open Law Library is doing good work.) The difficulty in building a high quality legal search engine is not in parsing the links between the documents. High quality links matter, but they only get you about 25% of the way there. The more important thing is to have a highly accurate and structured understanding of the law. (Think of Google's Knowledge Graph, or the maps they use for their driverless cars.) Disclaimer: I worked on Google Scholar and am the CEO of Judicata. A recent evaluation of various legal search engines [1] found: "The oldest database providers, Westlaw and Lexis, had the highest percentages of relevant results, at 67% and 57%, respectively. The newer legal database providers, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Casetext, and Ravel, were also clustered together at a lower relevance rate, returning approximately 40% relevant results." Westlaw, Lexis and Google Scholar all have high quality citation parsing (i.e., links). And Scholar relies very heavily on PageRank (as [1] demonstrates). But it is Westlaw and Lexis that are the better search engines. That's because they have invested more into going beyond just links; they've invested a lot into understanding what it is happening with the law. At Judicata our own findings are that the average legal search query is significantly more complex than the average Google query -- having more terms and more concepts. Moreover, whereas only 15% of Google queries are unique, the inverse is true in legal research: more than 85% of queries are unique. What that means is that in order to return a good result, you need to understand a lot more about the query and the documents you've indexed. You can't rely on links between documents and past searches and clicks to power a quality search engine (the way that Google.com can). As has been mentioned in other comments here, the real challenge for legal research is extracting structure out of the law (Shepardization, Procedural Postures, Causes of Actions, Dispositions, Legal Principles, Arguments, Facts, etc.). That is what will get legal search engines closer to where Google really shines -- results that are powered by the Google Knowledge Graph. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2859720 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2859720
- tomcam 10y ago
  Thank you for your perspective. It's quite helpful. However, I wouldn't even a plain text searchable database be better than nothing? And I don't understand how this can be monopolized by Westlaw when law should be public domain…
chris_wot 10y ago
When I was an active editor on Wikipedia, I rewrote the USA PATRIOT Act from scratch. It wasn't easy, and I'm not talking about the law itself here (though at 10 title long, with title III literally an anti-money laundering bill they bunged into the Act and had passed, it is still n extremely complex bit of legislation). No, I'm talking about the ability to find information on certain laws - I'm an Australian, so it was a major challenge to find good quality sources. I was lucky in a way, as the Patriot Act is so controversial I did eventually manage to track down info. But it wasn't easy, and when I tried to find sources for some truly ancient and tangential legislation a few times I hit a brick wall entirely. It makes me think: ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it... but with the current system you are often going to be ignorant of the law no matter what you do! Unless, of course, you have the money to pay for expensive legal searches. How anyone could consider resyricted access to information about the law and the law itself to be anything but a violation of human rights is beyond me.
- nradov 10y ago
  What sort of information and sources were you looking for? The Patriot Act text is available online, as are the (unclassified) notes from Congressional debates and voting records.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    All primary sources, which are allowed. However, there are plenty of other primary sources that I can't get easy access to, including case law. In fact, there are old Acts I found I didn't have any access to at all.
iam4xzor 10y ago
there's a french startup killing it https://www.doctrine.fr/ https://www.doctrine.fr/ (works for france only)
angled 10y ago
Is WorldLII not already a good start? http://www.worldlii.org/databases.html http://www.worldlii.org/databases.html
- emmelaich 10y ago
  I was about to mention AustLII http://www.austlii.edu.au/ http://www.austlii.edu.au/ which has been around for about 20 years. I hadn't heard of WorldLII and CanLII; seems they're part of a network. And it looks like AustLII was where it started; the WorldLII contacts are all AustLII people.
  - a3camero 10y ago
    There are many others: http://www.saflii.org/ http://www.saflii.org/ (Southern African countries) http://www.paclii.org/ http://www.paclii.org/ (Pacific Island countries)
- a3camero 10y ago
  WorldLII is great in theory but trying running some searches. The results are not nearly as good as just an aggregation of all the national "LII" systems would be (e.g. CanLii)
showerst 10y ago
Another group that's taking this on is https://github.com/statedecoded/statedecoded https://github.com/statedecoded/statedecoded -- although they're targeting converting existing data rather than being a workflow for the states.
Apocryphon 10y ago
"I want my lawyer program." http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=864 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=864
rayiner 10y ago
> The reasons this problem exists are complex, but they boil down to the fact that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways computers can easily process, making it difficult to extract the valuable information they contain. If the format were computer-friendly, it is easy to imagine leveraging the links between laws to improve search results. This is totally untrue. Legal documents are linked together with citations written according to very precise rules, which lawyers spend a lot of time getting correct. Almost all laws and cases are published in a quasi-append-only record: sequential publications in reporters organized by volume and page number. So unlike URLs on the Internet, 47 F.3d 167 will always refer to the same page of the same case. Forever. Most agency decisions, etc, have similar sequential records. Statues and regulations are precisely identified by structured citations as well. WestLaw and Lexis have no problem parsing these, and will happily find you all the cases that cite to say a specific Supreme Court case from 1880. The reasons lawyers use terms and connectors searches instead of a "Google-like" engine is because the underlying concept of Page Rank absolutely sucks for legal research. Page Rank equates in-degree in the link graph with relevance. This will get you highly cited cases that you knew anyway that are only tangentially related to the cases you actually need. In a legal brief, a couple of trial court decisions that are factually similar but uncited are infinitely more valuable than a highly cited Supreme Court case that happens to pertain to the same general area of law.
- rpedela 10y ago
  Why are they more valuable?
  - vqc 10y ago
    Judges like to see how other judges have ruled in similar situations. A generic SCOTUS opinion on a topic doesn't help too much.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    In addition to VCQ's point below, there is the fact that such cases are often simply not helpful despite technically being relevant. A seminal Supreme Court case might state the broad principle of law: e.g. you have a right to due process before losing government entitlements. But stuff like that is never actually disputed. In practice the dispute is over e.g. "how much process is enough?" or "when does a government benefit rise to the level of an entitlement?" The judge knows the big overarching Supreme Court case. While it's technically relevant, it's not helpful. What you need as the lawyer is to show the judge case law that supports your specific argument applying that general principle.
known 10y ago
https://indiankanoon.org/ https://indiankanoon.org/ in India
X86BSD 10y ago
Nexus/Lexus? Westlaw?
oarfish 10y ago
Well, for the german law, there is https://lawly.org https://lawly.org, the result of a recent bachelor's project at my university.
- AlbertoGP 10y ago
  This looks nice. Are you involved in it? I took a look at the Umsatzsteuer [Value Added Tax] part as I had to read it some years ago when I started freelancing: https://lawly.org/gesetz/UStG%201980/4.1#12-steuersaetze https://lawly.org/gesetz/UStG%201980/4.1#12-steuersaetze The Inhaltsübersicht [content overview] list at the right side is yellow on white which makes it hard to read. In comparison with the place where I've read the German law before, there seem to be surplus list elements in the HTML: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/BJNR119530979.html#BJNR119530979BJNG001204301 https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/BJNR119530979.h... It's nice though that by registering I could download the content for off-line use. AFAIK gesetze-im-internet.de does not provide that. Are there any other relevant differences between those two services?
abrbhat 10y ago
Indian Judiciary System has its own online repository of court orders. http://www.judis.nic.in/ http://www.judis.nic.in/
prohor 10y ago
I was always wondering rather on Stack Overflow for law, where one could get advice from other knowledgeable. But I talked with few lawyers (technologically open-minded) and they weren't interested. It seems the final root cause is that in software development the level that you get help is not the level where the end products are and compete. For lawyers it would be different - an advice is the root of their service, so it is the end product. So if they were helping with advice, they would directly help competition. Secondly, their customers could end up in that level instead (while software customers cannot benefit from stack overflow).
- ralfd 10y ago
  There is http://law.stackexchange.com/ http://law.stackexchange.com/ But I think it is not as active as others stackexchanges.
jacobheller 10y ago
Our startup, Casetext (YCS13) was mentioned a few times here, so I thought I'd stop in. The crux of the article is that most legal research solutions have ignored the immense power contained in the links between laws: > Laws frequently reference other laws in order to reuse definitions, introduce exceptions, or make it clear that two concepts are meant to work together. Consequential laws tend to get referenced in other laws as their influence spreads throughout the legal system. Experienced lawyers build up detailed mental maps of these links, allowing them to jump immediately to core issues of complex legal problems. > However, most laws can only be searched using the dark-age, Lycos strategy—guess at keywords and hope—and it’s often necessary to pay for even that limited functionality. We at Casetext are taking a very different approach than the "dark-age, Lycos strategy" that you have to pay for: 1. On Casetext, the law is free, as is basic search. Honestly, it's insane that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge as much as they do for basic keyword search over a database that should have been free to begin with. 2. We make money by charging for advanced, data-driven ways that lawyers can research more efficiently. CARA, our premium product, enables a lawyer to drag-and-drop upload a document they're working on, and will recommend the research that the lawyer missed but is very relevant to what they're working on (https://casetext.com/cara https://casetext.com/cara). A key ingredient behind this awesome tech is the network of citations that the article mentions. Whether it's us or other startups, I agree with the article that in the next few years you'll see a trend towards more "Google for Law" -- companies will make legal research free, and their comparative advantage will be on their technology, often driven by ML/AI. As a lawyer/coder, it's a pretty exciting time to be in the space. Oh yeah, and we're hiring! https://casetext.com/jobs https://casetext.com/jobs
richardboegli 10y ago
There is already one being worked on by Casetext. Just saw this posted to HN RSS feed by lever... Maybe lever watches what's trending on HN and then puts job adverts? If so, NICE ;) Become a Data Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer at Casetext https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307644 https://jobs.lever.co/casetext/c7f0129e-af9b-461e-b791-a93235cea2af https://jobs.lever.co/casetext/c7f0129e-af9b-461e-b791-a9323... Machine learning is at the core of Casetext's mission to make the law free and understandable and we're looking for an ML engineer/data scientist to help us build the next generation of legal research products. The data team at Casetext is working on groundbreaking legal technology for document recommendation and search. If you have industry experience developing production software for machine learning, especially in areas like NLP, graph models, topic modeling, and/or recommendation engines, we'd love to talk to you.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
liabilities
BenderV 10y ago
Doctrine, a French startup is actually doing this. https://www.doctrine.fr https://www.doctrine.fr [Disclaimer: I'm a Data Scientist @ Doctrine] Part of the reason why we are the only one providing something clear is that, indeed, law data is a mess, and we working hard to have a clean & consistent database. As simple point as legal references is really complex. Every country has it's own identifier system , some editor have their own identifier system and people are referencing in really different manners... The second point is that, we really heavily on NLP/DL to extract insights and informations about the data. This is something that couldn't have been done /easily/ in the past. Shameless plug: We are hiring! https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE [French only]
- grebett 10y ago
  Hehe, I was about to talk about you, but you were faster. Do you plan to expand to other countries legal system?
- touristtam 10y ago
  > Shameless plug: We are hiring! https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE [French only] Great, but for what position? This link is a multistep application form, and I am pretty sure others will find equally annoying to fill it up just to see the description of the job.
  - a455bcd9 10y ago
    Hey! You're right, we have 4 open positions on Angel List: https://angel.co/doctrine-/jobs https://angel.co/doctrine-/jobs [Disclaimer: Cofounder here ;)]
seshagiric 10y ago
One things that deserves a mention is the Lexis add-in for Microsoft Word. http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-for-microsoft-office.page http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-for-microsoft... It's a pretty cool utility to integrate sheparding, research and info from the online Lexis law database into the context of a document a lawyer/ para legal may already be working on.
mrleiter 10y ago
Speaking from a global perspective: every nation has its own way of writing and linking their laws. Although civil law countries, and case law countries respectively, have a lot of similarities (historically induced), they are still unique. That is not the case when it comes to searching the world wide web. Here, by design, everything is linked and national borders are mostly irrelevant. So if you want to implement a Google of law, you have to do it locally. The only exception would be international law, which itself can be seen as local.
- a3camero 10y ago
  You can also create a normalized system that aggregates all of the local systems together. And this also applies to international law (assuming you're talking about treaties) because there's a treaty and then there's the national implementing legislation in all of the treaty countries.
usloth_wandows 10y ago
There is, it just isn't free. Lawfirms pay mountains of money for up to date 'google for laws'. At least in the U.S.
WhiteSource1 10y ago
Lexis Nexus and Findlaw?As usloth_wandows said, there are law databases but that's a huge part of a lawyer's value and knowledge, so these databases are extremely expensive.
kaa2102 10y ago
The closest thing right now is Cornell's Legal Information Institute--https://www.law.cornell.edu https://www.law.cornell.edu. There is also the same problem with academic journals--Lexis Nexis has asearchable database with cases for a pretty penny. Also, pacer.gov enables users to access cases and dockets but the structure and "per page" cost make it difficult to be a useful search engine. I've argued a couple cases in district court (and one case is on the docket of the Supreme Court) and I've used a mix of law school textbooks, Scotusblog.com, Cornell's Legal Information Institute and lawyer's blogs to start background research. https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docketfiles/16-6814.htm https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docketfil...
aurizon 10y ago
Quite simply, this is a racket. Courts are public, and anyone can attend and write down what goes on and publish it. There is an official court reporter who does this. There is no authorship, but the reporter is granted a copyright. They then charge fees for access. The problem lies there. The courts should publish all cases in the open, with no copyright. That however blocks lawyer and reporter revenue streams and they will protect their racket.
erikb 10y ago
Why is google not enough google for the law? All my law requirements have been met by Google. And my lawyer friends also use it.
MistahKoala 10y ago
And not just why isn't there something that links legislative citations together, but why isn't there something that can tell laypeople what is current legislation and what isn't? In the UK, we have numerous acts of the same name but different years. If I find some information about a slightly obscure issue of concern - say, a website that's ten years old - it might cite an act of a particular year - and I then look up the details of that legislation, I can see it, but I've no idea if or how it currently applies, it it's been superseded by newer legislation etc; it might even just be a list of 'edits' to previous legislation that aren't easily researched by someone without a formal understanding of law. The common response to this has usually been "that's why you need s [jurist]", but I take issue with the idea that the legislation that applies equally to us should only be understood by those equipped with the means to make sense of it.
anotherhacker 10y ago
>Why isn't there a Google for the law? There's no (or little) money to be made doing it. Maybe in the future when collecting and modeling such knowledge is cheap. For now, it's not cheap.
Mathnerd314 10y ago
I'll just mention PlainSite: http://www.plainsite.org/ http://www.plainsite.org/ It basically is "google for the law" (provided that your definition of law only extends to federal courts and state appeals courts). But they typically have full opinions available for free. General summary: http://thelegalpioneer.blogspot.com/2014/02/plainsite-putting-law-in-plain-sight.html http://thelegalpioneer.blogspot.com/2014/02/plainsite-puttin...
a3camero 10y ago
I'm the CTO of Global-Regulation.com which is the search service with the most number of countries (78) and machine translated laws. We are often described by clients as the "Google of laws" but there are huge differences. Getting to Google-level search, where the engine understands your intent, is very challenging. People often search for industry terms like "SAR reporting" and what they want is Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR). A Google-like engine would need to understand what the query means from an industry point of view (since the terms often don't actually appear in legislation) and then translate that to the specific term used in each country. This is far from trivial and requires looking at secondary sources, not just the laws themselves. Other problems include official vs. unofficial laws, slow consolidations, updates to the law (of various kinds) and attempting to normalize the world's laws to a US standard (like excluding municipal laws and avoiding guidance-type documents from civil law countries). These are problems Google doesn't have to deal with and customers expect a very high standard for legal search results.
palunon 10y ago
In France we have Legifrance, which is government run, and give you access to every France law, code, etc, and let you see modifications over times and where the article is cited (the "links"). Eg. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsessionid=3178D9B64C307BBB4A2D9CA27EE167A2.tpdila22v_1?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071154&idArticle=LEGIARTI000032655793&dateTexte=20170103&categorieLien=cid#LEGIARTI000032655793 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsession... It's probably made simpler by the fact that we are not a federation with law making bodies everywhere...
cakeface 10y ago
Another reason why it is difficult to create the "google" for the law is that some laws are copyrighted and are not in the public domain. Stop. Think about what I just said. There are laws that you must pay to read. A good example of this is when a state or municipality enacts a building code. A common building code is the electrical code published by NFPA. Most states use this. NFPA owns the copyright for this. You cannot publish a PDF of the electrical code on your website, yet you are required by law to follow it. There may be other cases of this, I don't know. But I think it is crazy!
josh5555 10y ago
There is. It is called "Google".
waspleg 10y ago
because money source: my dad was a lawyer for 20+ years.

371 points by vqc 10y ago

There are plenty of sources for acts (many national and supra-national services [1]) and for US case law (Google Scholar). The _text_ of law alone is worthless. In very few cases you should search for keywords. The unsolved problem is that what is needed (and there are private systems that can do this) is the ability to make queries like In 2014 my only child was 17, my family lived in Italy but I worked most of my time in the UK; which version of the Italian child-care law applied to me at the time? In order to answer this query you need to: 1. Know all the text of all the acts out there at the Italian level, European level and supra-national level. 2. Find the main acts that deal with child-care law. 3. Find all the acts that modify those main acts (they could extend it duration, modify its content). 3b. Find all the acts that modify the acts that modify those main acts (maybe the extension has been repelled). 3c. Find all the acts that modify the acts that modify the acts that modify those main acts (I think the point is clear now) 4. Consolidate (merge) all these acts using the rules that were in place at the time of the enactment. This produces a tree of versions for each point in time, not just a single version. 5. Find all the judgments that reference any of these acts. 6. Highlight the points that have to do with the user query. Truth be told, having the raw text (point 1) is the easiest part. The rest is what is extremely complicated. Regardless of this, there are private systems in places that can perform this kind of queries (although in a very limited fashion: their idea of "the whole corpus of law" is extremely narrow). To make the life of implementers easier, markup formats like AkomaNtoso [2] or Oasis LegalDocumentML/LegalRuleML [3] are being used, sadly not enough. Making the corpus of the law accessible is an important first step. But the corpus alone is is not going to be much helpful. It may even be dangerous if the single texts are not cross-referenced with other relevant texts. Appeal to authority: I worked on versioning legal documents (bills, acts, judgments, etc) during my PhD. I also worked in the research group that shaped the early versions of AkomaNtoso. [1] IT: http://normattiva.it http://normattiva.it (ex NormeInRete) DE: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de EU: http://eur-lex.europa.eu http://eur-lex.europa.eu US-CA: http://legisweb.com http://legisweb.com [2] http://akomantoso.org http://akomantoso.org [3] http://www.legalxml.org/ http://www.legalxml.org/

matt4077 10y ago
I worked on a platform for EU law for about half a year and got quite deep into Akoma Ntoso. It's certainly the right direction but it was unfortunately extremely difficult to even get an overview of the status. The various websites felt dead and the documentation wasn't inspiring my confidence either – IIRC it was actually provided as a word document :). Plus, I just couldn't find anybody publicly using it. The EU parliament supposedly does, but they could never give me an answer why they weren't sharing it online (only .doc and .pdf).
- ocky7 10y ago
  Apparently, the UN and some African countries also make use of Akoma Ntoso, but like you I've never seen it in practice. Open data is not provided well. For example, it is possible to get XML documents from the EU parliament, but you have to request access to their FTP server and it is a laborious process. I've met Monica Palmirani of Akoma Ntoso recently and she told me they have just launched a case law standard, and so they're still working on it. I'm actually amazed she hasn't burned out yet. Trying to get governments to play nice data-wise is i n c r e d i b l y hard.
  - oever 10y ago
    The case-law standard is called ECLI. It's used in a few countries and being rolled out in more. At least one Dutch news paper uses ECLI when referring to court cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECLI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECLI http://bo-ecli.eu/ http://bo-ecli.eu/ Dutch law and government publications are available as XML and ODF. The constitution: http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2008-07-15 http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2008-07-15 A publication about standards: https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2015-39782.html https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2015-39782.htm... Each article can be linked and documents referring to each article can be found as well. For example all known documents that link to article 5 (equality) of the constitution: http://linkeddata.overheid.nl/embedded/portal/spiegel-lijstweergave?juriconnect=jci1.3%3ac%3aBWBR0001840%26hoofdstuk%3d1%26artikel%3d1%26z%3d2008-07-15%26g%3d2008-07-15 http://linkeddata.overheid.nl/embedded/portal/spiegel-lijstw... The links are available as RDF. Currently work is underway to publish law as XML and RDF with ODF/PDF/HTML as secondary formats. This will allow embedding of data such as property lines, lists of medicines, reusable financial reports.

jarjoura 10y ago

In university I had full access to LexusNexus, of course it's not free, but you could literally find any obscure legal text written in the country's history, in the click of a button.

sdegutis 10y ago
I think the point is that Google "understands" what you mean even if you don't say it quite right, or use the right phrases or words, and that's especially needed when searching for legal rights and things where what you're looking for often uses completely obscure or weird language. From the article: > "However, most laws can only be searched using the dark-age, Lycos strategy—guess at keywords and hope—and it’s often necessary to pay for even that limited functionality."
wfunction 10y ago
It's "LexisNexis"... it's not referring to the nexus of a car company. :)

katpas 10y ago

This reminds me of the concepts written about here* basically trying to develop robust definitions for legal terms and objects so a question like 'what are my rights in X situation' could be answered accurately by a computer. *http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-symbolic-discourse-and-the-ai-constitution/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-sym...

cookiecaper 10y ago
The issue with our system of justice is that it's too unfeeling and robotic. Everyone has an inherent sense of what's just, yet it takes at least 7 years of schooling and many difficult technical achievements to be allowed to participate in its implementation (beyond simply plucking suspects from the street). Making it computerized does not seem like the correct course of action. Human judges and juries are needed to fully evaluate the context and pass judgment. My personal preference would be to go toward a less rigid system of law, not one so rigid that computers could reliably enforce it.
- nradov 10y ago
  When the law becomes less rigid that means that whoever happens to be in power at the time gets to decide on a whim what's legal or illegal. Historically that hasn't worked out very well.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    "Whoever happens to be in power" already decides what's legal or illegal. That's what being in power means. No one respects a piece of paper; power ultimately comes down to the ability to exert force to see the decrees of the powerful imposed. If this isn't underneath the covers somewhere, the power moves to someone who does have this ability. There's already a huge amount of finagling by powerful individuals and groups in our government, they just have a lot of pomp and circumstance to try to cover it up. Removing some of the formalities makes flexibility more accessible. Sure, you can spend the millions of dollars it takes to successfully lobby Congress if you're a big multinational corporation. If you're a niche concern, you're stuck. Everyone hates mandatory minimum sentences these days. They were put in for a lot of drug crimes in the late 80s-early 90s, and they result in a lot of unneeded incarcerations, not only costing the taxpayer a lot of money, but costing society, family, and community the participation and productivity of someone who would be much more beneficial outside than in. Because of our rigid legal traditions, mandatory minimums must be enforced regardless of circumstances. When you get down to the bottom of it, no matter what system of governance you have, you need its administrators to be benevolent and wise to get desirable outcomes. I believe that more local authorities are more able to make wise decisions because they not only know the area more intimately, but are more impacted by the outcomes. A far-off judge doesn't care if he sends 40% of the community to jail. A local judge does. This is kind of like being entitled to being judged by a jury of your peers. Peers know the cultural norms and the local expectations. High-powered attorneys sitting on a bench in Washington, D.C. may not.

maxboisvert 10y ago

We have free access to law with canlii.org in Canada.

vqc 10y ago
I'm not familiar at all with Canadian law. Does canlii.org provide statutes, regs, case law from every jurisdiction from the local level (cities/towns) up through the federal level? Is this a distinction that matters?
- citeright 10y ago
  You can see CanLII's coverage here: https://www.canlii.org/en/databases.html https://www.canlii.org/en/databases.html.
  - vqc 10y ago
    That is magnificent. It seems to "end" at the province/territory level (*this is not a critique at all). How does lawmaking work at the city level?
    - a3camero 10y ago
      Cities pass "bylaws" that affect their municipality. In Canada municipalities are more limited in their lawmaking powers than cities in some other countries. Bylaws are hard to lookup and are city-specific.
a3camero 10y ago
It is free-ish. It's free to use but there are restrictive licensing terms that prevent anyone from building anything with it: http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html. My blog post on this topic: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ and https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/ https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/.

josto 10y ago

Judicata is a start. You can search California statutes and case law. But lexis and westlaw are the tools needed for serious research.

meddlepal 10y ago
My brother who is a lawyer said Westlaw and LexusNexus have the unfortunate problem of being 99.9% accurate but the original source material still sometimes needs to be pulled because of errors during import such as a dropped comma which can change entire meanings of a law.

cia48621793 10y ago

Because when we have Google for Law, lawyers are obsoleted.

eelliott 10y ago

As a lawyer I've thought a lot about this (and if anyone is working on this and wants to talk get in touch). There are two reasons: 1. Reasoning in law relies on complex language semantics, both in statute and case law. Take for example a court decision that says "in the circumstances of this case I do not agree that John v Doe applies". That can be expressed a million ways and I'm not sure our natural language processing can replace humans yet in this area. 2. There is a lot of copyright problems that need to be overcome. Companies like Lexis and Westlaw own the rights to a lot of decisions and even statutes and can paywall the . This is slowly changing however, for example in the UK recently the courts took back the rights to publish decisions.

nawtacawp 10y ago
It does not seem ethical to hold a person accountable for not following a law, if they do not have free access to read that law and the various ways the court has ruled to how that law should be applied.
- eelliott 10y ago
  I agree entirely however law is like all professions where access to information is only half the equation, its application and interpretation is derived from extensive training and experience. So I'd argue that until we nail 'Google for the law', access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    >access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases That itself is a problem, while we have public defense lawyers, we don't have public preventive lawyers (who I can call and ask if what I'm about to do is altogether legal and what can I do to avoid run-ins with the law).
    - Spivak 10y ago

SmellTheGlove 10y ago

Casetext is a startup working on that, at least for case law, which is the more difficult body to gain efficient access to in the US: https://casetext.com/ https://casetext.com/ I'm not associated with them at all, other than once emailing the founder best wishes.

vqc 10y ago
Casetext and Judicata are great companies working on searching through judicial opinions. There's a lot to be said about PACER and publishing state judicial opinions. Suffice it to say, those companies could probably save a lot of time on parsing and focus on other problems instead if judicial opinions were released with some structured information, e.g. party names and procedural posture. Open Law Library makes it possible for legislatures to, among other things, publish their laws in structured formats. One thing to consider is that on a day-to-day basis, an individual might be impacted more by city/county/state law than by federal law.

mtdewcmu 10y ago

It would be a good idea to make a wiki, since the laws themselves aren't very readable.

vqc 10y ago

Co-founder of Open Law Library here. Happy to answer any questions about what we're building, the law, and anything else people are interested to discuss.

pryelluw 10y ago
How can people (like me) contribute? The word Open makes me think you accept non-monetary contributions.
- vqc 10y ago
  With respect to contributing code, the short answer is that we're not sure yet. There is certainly no shortage of code to write, but we want to make sure that we work with volunteers in the right way. For anyone that's interested in please reach out here or through the contact form on our website. I will personally respond to everyone. Other than writing code, we need advocates in and out of government who understand and believe in the value of free (as in freedom) and accessible laws. Contact your local, state, federal representative and let them know that free and accessible laws are important to you. Let them know that a system exists that can not only make this a possibility, but that it will also make their lives a lot easier. We would also love to hear about what you would want to build on top of computer-readable, always up-to-date laws that could programmatically alert you when something changed and let you diff against old versions of the law. E.g. a) internal annotations for civil servants that wouldn't immediately be obsolete once the legal code changed; and b) legal alert system for the part of the law you care about. We'll put together a form that makes it easier to collect this information!
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Aside from code, how are you gathering the laws themselves? Public libraries?
    - vqc 10y ago
      We get them directly from the source. Previous attempts at accomplishing our mission saw organizations scraping government websites and re-hosting the laws on prettier websites. The problem was that a) the laws were only as up-to-date as the law the governments made available (which, unfortunately, are not up-to-date at all) and b) the projects were not sustainable because no one pays to access the law and websites needed updating every time the law changed. Sites like these are potentially very harmful. They haven't been updated in years and people who stumble upon them and miss the fine print end up relying on laws that have long since changed. Because timeliness matters, the only way to guarantee that we get it is by working directly with the governments. So we build software into the law drafting, codifying, and publishing process that governments can really benefit from and enjoy using. The software changes the economics of codification and publication and permits publishing the laws freely and openly.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Anecdote, I was at Google in 2006 and there was (is?) a database of ideas that people shared that Google might pursue. As their motto was organize the world's information and make it easily accessible. I had gotten a ticket for obstructing the intersection (the "anti-congestion" law in California that sought to limit gridlock by making it illegal to enter an intersection that you couldn't exit before the other light changed). I was fighting it and wanted to find other cases that had been decided on this law[1]. The only way to do that was to go to the public library and look through their published volumes of decisions and cases. So I thought here is a really useful thing Google could do, it isn't even a hard problem, collect the decisions that the courts publish anyway, and just connect the ones that are about the same part of the code. Match a number, match a date. And very useful to people who are fighting cases. It saved me some time and money [2]. But the idea never made it past the discussion stage because, as I was counseled, doing that would take on "powerful interests" who would really fight back hard and Google didn't want to draw that level of scrutiny. It wasn't until Carl Malamude started attacking this problem in earnest[3] that it became clear to me what it means to take away a revenue stream from lawyers. [1] And learned this is called 'Sheparding' based on finding citations -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard's_Citations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard's_Citations [2] turns out there had been no case law on this particular law and lots of dismissals so I just entered a plea of not guilty at the clerk, and the court informed me a week before my trial date that the prosecution had declined to prosecute. [3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150726/23080731763/even-if-state-georgia-can-copyright-legal-annotations-should-it.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150726/23080731763/even-...

marcoperaza 10y ago
>I had gotten a ticket for obstructing the intersection (the "anti-congestion" law in California that sought to limit gridlock by making it illegal to enter an intersection that you couldn't exit before the other light changed). You monster. :)
- diogenescynic 10y ago
  To be fair, there is a lot of traffic created from this problem--especially in the Financial District in San Francisco. Whereas NYC has those "don't block the box" signs and it seems like their drivers are much more aware of it.

Ericson2314 10y ago

Uh, the real question is "why isn't there git for the law".

xiaq 10y ago
Good point, laws will be much easier to search if they are stored in a revision controlled system in the first place. But I think that it is even harder than what Open Law Library is trying to do.
Animats 10y ago
There is at the Federal level.[1] It's XML-based. Here's an example of a bill in raw XML.[1] It displays in the form that a bill is printed.[2] The GPO even puts in the XML, "Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain." There's a change control system behind all this. Here's a history of a bill, again, in XML.[4] There are change transactions, which are also in XML, but they're not in this database. [1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata [2] view-source:https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS-114hconres106ih.xml https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS... [3] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS-114hconres106ih.xml https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS... [4] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/114/sres/BILLSTATUS-114sres99.xml https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/114/sres/BILLS...
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  Thank you! I was unaware of any of this. It is understanding that bills are patches, and thus the law works like darcs—patch-oriented rather than revision-oriented. Does this sound correct to you? I arrived at this conclusion asking people who know nothing about VCS, so something mighthave been lost in translation.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Yes, and no. Each bill is subject to revisions, but once it is passed, it is a single patch – you could imagine that each bill is a branch in git, developed in commits one after another, and then the latest status is squashed and merged.

nickjamespdx 10y ago

Has no one mentioned Ravel yet? https://www.ravellaw.com/search https://www.ravellaw.com/search

sfRattan 10y ago

Appropriate that this subject makes an appearance on HN so close to the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's suicide under duress and attack from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Making court documents more publicly accessible was one of Aaron's projects (circa 2008). He and project collaborators downloaded more than a million documents from the government's PACER electronic access system using public library terminals and attracted the attention of the FBI.[1] Part of the goal at the time was to uncover privacy violations in filed court documents that were legally a matter of public record but behind a lucrative, government administrated pay wall.[2] There is something important to be said for the social and moral importance of keeping the public record publicly accessible. The justification for these intermediaries to exist and extract rent from the cataloging of public information grows slimmer and slimmer, but cataloging and indexing everything in a common law (precedent based) system is tremendously expensive. I suspect that developing of an algorithm to usefully search the dense and interweaving web of judicial opinions, case history, written legislation, and jurisdictions in which all those elements apply/overlap/supersede each other is also a massive capital investment. It all does have to be paid for somehow, and I don't think how to fund is a settled question. Pay walls clearly have pernicious externalities (privacy violations go unnoticed; access to law is practically limited to professionals for whom the costs are a business expense). But I don't trust the state to properly fund or develop such a service through general tax either. Consider supporting the individuals in this thread who are working to make that sort of open information access in law a reality, and consider also who will seek rent from the finished service who will not. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#PACER [2]: https://public.resource.org/crime/ https://public.resource.org/crime/

chris_wot 10y ago
The law is formed by the government and the judiciary and applies to everyone living in or visiting the State. It's entirely reasonable to require the State to pay for unfettered access to the law.
- sfRattan 10y ago
  Just as it is entirely reasonable not to trust the state to do so either competently or altruistically.

dvdhnt 10y ago

> The reasons this problem exists are complex, but they boil down to the fact that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways computers can easily process, making it difficult to extract the valuable information they contain. I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand. Furthermore, I believe this ambiguity directly impacts the governed, causing them to be, in general, distrustful of most laws that do not affect them in an observable way. Making laws more digestible is only part of the solution; the "what" should be annotated with the "why". Otherwise, with so many decentralized cities in an already decentralized nation, fundamentally sound, universally-applicable legislation may be ignored due to stereotypes and generalizations. Whereas, documented and annotated legislation can be analyzed, duplicated, and modified to fit different environments around the country, or reasonably ignored on verifiable grounds.

ksikka 10y ago
> I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand. So true. A premise of this blog post is that laws need to be easier for computers to understand, but that's skipping a step: making laws easy for humans to understand. I really like what TLDRLegal did: made software licenses digestible by humans. I would love to see similar sites pop up for other verticals of the law, but it's a lot of work and there's not much incentive to get it done at the quality-level of TLDRLegal.
- dvdhnt 10y ago
  I had to note I also enjoy TLDRLegal... I wish they'd open an API.

drdeadringer 10y ago

I remember when Google Patent was around. My uncle and cousin found it very useful as patent lawyers on both ends of the experience spectrum. When it got shut down they were disappointed.

arthurcolle 10y ago
Google Patent shut down? Whaaat
- loqwe 10y ago
  https://patents.google.com/ https://patents.google.com/
  - lgas 10y ago
    It has risen.

igurari 10y ago

The premise of this blog post is a little off base. (Though I think Open Law Library is doing good work.) The difficulty in building a high quality legal search engine is not in parsing the links between the documents. High quality links matter, but they only get you about 25% of the way there. The more important thing is to have a highly accurate and structured understanding of the law. (Think of Google's Knowledge Graph, or the maps they use for their driverless cars.) Disclaimer: I worked on Google Scholar and am the CEO of Judicata. A recent evaluation of various legal search engines [1] found: "The oldest database providers, Westlaw and Lexis, had the highest percentages of relevant results, at 67% and 57%, respectively. The newer legal database providers, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Casetext, and Ravel, were also clustered together at a lower relevance rate, returning approximately 40% relevant results." Westlaw, Lexis and Google Scholar all have high quality citation parsing (i.e., links). And Scholar relies very heavily on PageRank (as [1] demonstrates). But it is Westlaw and Lexis that are the better search engines. That's because they have invested more into going beyond just links; they've invested a lot into understanding what it is happening with the law. At Judicata our own findings are that the average legal search query is significantly more complex than the average Google query -- having more terms and more concepts. Moreover, whereas only 15% of Google queries are unique, the inverse is true in legal research: more than 85% of queries are unique. What that means is that in order to return a good result, you need to understand a lot more about the query and the documents you've indexed. You can't rely on links between documents and past searches and clicks to power a quality search engine (the way that Google.com can). As has been mentioned in other comments here, the real challenge for legal research is extracting structure out of the law (Shepardization, Procedural Postures, Causes of Actions, Dispositions, Legal Principles, Arguments, Facts, etc.). That is what will get legal search engines closer to where Google really shines -- results that are powered by the Google Knowledge Graph. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2859720 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2859720

tomcam 10y ago
Thank you for your perspective. It's quite helpful. However, I wouldn't even a plain text searchable database be better than nothing? And I don't understand how this can be monopolized by Westlaw when law should be public domain…

chris_wot 10y ago

When I was an active editor on Wikipedia, I rewrote the USA PATRIOT Act from scratch. It wasn't easy, and I'm not talking about the law itself here (though at 10 title long, with title III literally an anti-money laundering bill they bunged into the Act and had passed, it is still n extremely complex bit of legislation). No, I'm talking about the ability to find information on certain laws - I'm an Australian, so it was a major challenge to find good quality sources. I was lucky in a way, as the Patriot Act is so controversial I did eventually manage to track down info. But it wasn't easy, and when I tried to find sources for some truly ancient and tangential legislation a few times I hit a brick wall entirely. It makes me think: ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it... but with the current system you are often going to be ignorant of the law no matter what you do! Unless, of course, you have the money to pay for expensive legal searches. How anyone could consider resyricted access to information about the law and the law itself to be anything but a violation of human rights is beyond me.

nradov 10y ago
What sort of information and sources were you looking for? The Patriot Act text is available online, as are the (unclassified) notes from Congressional debates and voting records.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  All primary sources, which are allowed. However, there are plenty of other primary sources that I can't get easy access to, including case law. In fact, there are old Acts I found I didn't have any access to at all.

iam4xzor 10y ago

there's a french startup killing it https://www.doctrine.fr/ https://www.doctrine.fr/ (works for france only)

angled 10y ago

Is WorldLII not already a good start? http://www.worldlii.org/databases.html http://www.worldlii.org/databases.html

emmelaich 10y ago
I was about to mention AustLII http://www.austlii.edu.au/ http://www.austlii.edu.au/ which has been around for about 20 years. I hadn't heard of WorldLII and CanLII; seems they're part of a network. And it looks like AustLII was where it started; the WorldLII contacts are all AustLII people.
- a3camero 10y ago
  There are many others: http://www.saflii.org/ http://www.saflii.org/ (Southern African countries) http://www.paclii.org/ http://www.paclii.org/ (Pacific Island countries)
a3camero 10y ago
WorldLII is great in theory but trying running some searches. The results are not nearly as good as just an aggregation of all the national "LII" systems would be (e.g. CanLii)

showerst 10y ago

Another group that's taking this on is https://github.com/statedecoded/statedecoded https://github.com/statedecoded/statedecoded -- although they're targeting converting existing data rather than being a workflow for the states.

Apocryphon 10y ago

"I want my lawyer program." http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=864 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=864

rayiner 10y ago

> The reasons this problem exists are complex, but they boil down to the fact that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways computers can easily process, making it difficult to extract the valuable information they contain. If the format were computer-friendly, it is easy to imagine leveraging the links between laws to improve search results. This is totally untrue. Legal documents are linked together with citations written according to very precise rules, which lawyers spend a lot of time getting correct. Almost all laws and cases are published in a quasi-append-only record: sequential publications in reporters organized by volume and page number. So unlike URLs on the Internet, 47 F.3d 167 will always refer to the same page of the same case. Forever. Most agency decisions, etc, have similar sequential records. Statues and regulations are precisely identified by structured citations as well. WestLaw and Lexis have no problem parsing these, and will happily find you all the cases that cite to say a specific Supreme Court case from 1880. The reasons lawyers use terms and connectors searches instead of a "Google-like" engine is because the underlying concept of Page Rank absolutely sucks for legal research. Page Rank equates in-degree in the link graph with relevance. This will get you highly cited cases that you knew anyway that are only tangentially related to the cases you actually need. In a legal brief, a couple of trial court decisions that are factually similar but uncited are infinitely more valuable than a highly cited Supreme Court case that happens to pertain to the same general area of law.

rpedela 10y ago
Why are they more valuable?
- vqc 10y ago
  Judges like to see how other judges have ruled in similar situations. A generic SCOTUS opinion on a topic doesn't help too much.
- rayiner 10y ago
  In addition to VCQ's point below, there is the fact that such cases are often simply not helpful despite technically being relevant. A seminal Supreme Court case might state the broad principle of law: e.g. you have a right to due process before losing government entitlements. But stuff like that is never actually disputed. In practice the dispute is over e.g. "how much process is enough?" or "when does a government benefit rise to the level of an entitlement?" The judge knows the big overarching Supreme Court case. While it's technically relevant, it's not helpful. What you need as the lawyer is to show the judge case law that supports your specific argument applying that general principle.

known 10y ago

https://indiankanoon.org/ https://indiankanoon.org/ in India

X86BSD 10y ago

Nexus/Lexus? Westlaw?

oarfish 10y ago

Well, for the german law, there is https://lawly.org https://lawly.org, the result of a recent bachelor's project at my university.

AlbertoGP 10y ago
This looks nice. Are you involved in it? I took a look at the Umsatzsteuer [Value Added Tax] part as I had to read it some years ago when I started freelancing: https://lawly.org/gesetz/UStG%201980/4.1#12-steuersaetze https://lawly.org/gesetz/UStG%201980/4.1#12-steuersaetze The Inhaltsübersicht [content overview] list at the right side is yellow on white which makes it hard to read. In comparison with the place where I've read the German law before, there seem to be surplus list elements in the HTML: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/BJNR119530979.html#BJNR119530979BJNG001204301 https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/BJNR119530979.h... It's nice though that by registering I could download the content for off-line use. AFAIK gesetze-im-internet.de does not provide that. Are there any other relevant differences between those two services?

abrbhat 10y ago

Indian Judiciary System has its own online repository of court orders. http://www.judis.nic.in/ http://www.judis.nic.in/

prohor 10y ago

I was always wondering rather on Stack Overflow for law, where one could get advice from other knowledgeable. But I talked with few lawyers (technologically open-minded) and they weren't interested. It seems the final root cause is that in software development the level that you get help is not the level where the end products are and compete. For lawyers it would be different - an advice is the root of their service, so it is the end product. So if they were helping with advice, they would directly help competition. Secondly, their customers could end up in that level instead (while software customers cannot benefit from stack overflow).

ralfd 10y ago
There is http://law.stackexchange.com/ http://law.stackexchange.com/ But I think it is not as active as others stackexchanges.

jacobheller 10y ago

Our startup, Casetext (YCS13) was mentioned a few times here, so I thought I'd stop in. The crux of the article is that most legal research solutions have ignored the immense power contained in the links between laws: > Laws frequently reference other laws in order to reuse definitions, introduce exceptions, or make it clear that two concepts are meant to work together. Consequential laws tend to get referenced in other laws as their influence spreads throughout the legal system. Experienced lawyers build up detailed mental maps of these links, allowing them to jump immediately to core issues of complex legal problems. > However, most laws can only be searched using the dark-age, Lycos strategy—guess at keywords and hope—and it’s often necessary to pay for even that limited functionality. We at Casetext are taking a very different approach than the "dark-age, Lycos strategy" that you have to pay for: 1. On Casetext, the law is free, as is basic search. Honestly, it's insane that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge as much as they do for basic keyword search over a database that should have been free to begin with. 2. We make money by charging for advanced, data-driven ways that lawyers can research more efficiently. CARA, our premium product, enables a lawyer to drag-and-drop upload a document they're working on, and will recommend the research that the lawyer missed but is very relevant to what they're working on (https://casetext.com/cara https://casetext.com/cara). A key ingredient behind this awesome tech is the network of citations that the article mentions. Whether it's us or other startups, I agree with the article that in the next few years you'll see a trend towards more "Google for Law" -- companies will make legal research free, and their comparative advantage will be on their technology, often driven by ML/AI. As a lawyer/coder, it's a pretty exciting time to be in the space. Oh yeah, and we're hiring! https://casetext.com/jobs https://casetext.com/jobs

richardboegli 10y ago

There is already one being worked on by Casetext. Just saw this posted to HN RSS feed by lever... Maybe lever watches what's trending on HN and then puts job adverts? If so, NICE ;) Become a Data Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer at Casetext https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307644 https://jobs.lever.co/casetext/c7f0129e-af9b-461e-b791-a93235cea2af https://jobs.lever.co/casetext/c7f0129e-af9b-461e-b791-a9323... Machine learning is at the core of Casetext's mission to make the law free and understandable and we're looking for an ML engineer/data scientist to help us build the next generation of legal research products. The data team at Casetext is working on groundbreaking legal technology for document recommendation and search. If you have industry experience developing production software for machine learning, especially in areas like NLP, graph models, topic modeling, and/or recommendation engines, we'd love to talk to you.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

liabilities

BenderV 10y ago

Doctrine, a French startup is actually doing this. https://www.doctrine.fr https://www.doctrine.fr [Disclaimer: I'm a Data Scientist @ Doctrine] Part of the reason why we are the only one providing something clear is that, indeed, law data is a mess, and we working hard to have a clean & consistent database. As simple point as legal references is really complex. Every country has it's own identifier system , some editor have their own identifier system and people are referencing in really different manners... The second point is that, we really heavily on NLP/DL to extract insights and informations about the data. This is something that couldn't have been done /easily/ in the past. Shameless plug: We are hiring! https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE [French only]

grebett 10y ago
Hehe, I was about to talk about you, but you were faster. Do you plan to expand to other countries legal system?
touristtam 10y ago
> Shameless plug: We are hiring! https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE [French only] Great, but for what position? This link is a multistep application form, and I am pretty sure others will find equally annoying to fill it up just to see the description of the job.
- a455bcd9 10y ago
  Hey! You're right, we have 4 open positions on Angel List: https://angel.co/doctrine-/jobs https://angel.co/doctrine-/jobs [Disclaimer: Cofounder here ;)]

seshagiric 10y ago

One things that deserves a mention is the Lexis add-in for Microsoft Word. http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-for-microsoft-office.page http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-for-microsoft... It's a pretty cool utility to integrate sheparding, research and info from the online Lexis law database into the context of a document a lawyer/ para legal may already be working on.

mrleiter 10y ago

Speaking from a global perspective: every nation has its own way of writing and linking their laws. Although civil law countries, and case law countries respectively, have a lot of similarities (historically induced), they are still unique. That is not the case when it comes to searching the world wide web. Here, by design, everything is linked and national borders are mostly irrelevant. So if you want to implement a Google of law, you have to do it locally. The only exception would be international law, which itself can be seen as local.

a3camero 10y ago
You can also create a normalized system that aggregates all of the local systems together. And this also applies to international law (assuming you're talking about treaties) because there's a treaty and then there's the national implementing legislation in all of the treaty countries.

usloth_wandows 10y ago

There is, it just isn't free. Lawfirms pay mountains of money for up to date 'google for laws'. At least in the U.S.

WhiteSource1 10y ago

Lexis Nexus and Findlaw?As usloth_wandows said, there are law databases but that's a huge part of a lawyer's value and knowledge, so these databases are extremely expensive.

kaa2102 10y ago

The closest thing right now is Cornell's Legal Information Institute--https://www.law.cornell.edu https://www.law.cornell.edu. There is also the same problem with academic journals--Lexis Nexis has asearchable database with cases for a pretty penny. Also, pacer.gov enables users to access cases and dockets but the structure and "per page" cost make it difficult to be a useful search engine. I've argued a couple cases in district court (and one case is on the docket of the Supreme Court) and I've used a mix of law school textbooks, Scotusblog.com, Cornell's Legal Information Institute and lawyer's blogs to start background research. https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docketfiles/16-6814.htm https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docketfil...

aurizon 10y ago

Quite simply, this is a racket. Courts are public, and anyone can attend and write down what goes on and publish it. There is an official court reporter who does this. There is no authorship, but the reporter is granted a copyright. They then charge fees for access. The problem lies there. The courts should publish all cases in the open, with no copyright. That however blocks lawyer and reporter revenue streams and they will protect their racket.

erikb 10y ago

Why is google not enough google for the law? All my law requirements have been met by Google. And my lawyer friends also use it.

MistahKoala 10y ago

And not just why isn't there something that links legislative citations together, but why isn't there something that can tell laypeople what is current legislation and what isn't? In the UK, we have numerous acts of the same name but different years. If I find some information about a slightly obscure issue of concern - say, a website that's ten years old - it might cite an act of a particular year - and I then look up the details of that legislation, I can see it, but I've no idea if or how it currently applies, it it's been superseded by newer legislation etc; it might even just be a list of 'edits' to previous legislation that aren't easily researched by someone without a formal understanding of law. The common response to this has usually been "that's why you need s [jurist]", but I take issue with the idea that the legislation that applies equally to us should only be understood by those equipped with the means to make sense of it.

anotherhacker 10y ago

>Why isn't there a Google for the law? There's no (or little) money to be made doing it. Maybe in the future when collecting and modeling such knowledge is cheap. For now, it's not cheap.

Mathnerd314 10y ago

I'll just mention PlainSite: http://www.plainsite.org/ http://www.plainsite.org/ It basically is "google for the law" (provided that your definition of law only extends to federal courts and state appeals courts). But they typically have full opinions available for free. General summary: http://thelegalpioneer.blogspot.com/2014/02/plainsite-putting-law-in-plain-sight.html http://thelegalpioneer.blogspot.com/2014/02/plainsite-puttin...

a3camero 10y ago

I'm the CTO of Global-Regulation.com which is the search service with the most number of countries (78) and machine translated laws. We are often described by clients as the "Google of laws" but there are huge differences. Getting to Google-level search, where the engine understands your intent, is very challenging. People often search for industry terms like "SAR reporting" and what they want is Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR). A Google-like engine would need to understand what the query means from an industry point of view (since the terms often don't actually appear in legislation) and then translate that to the specific term used in each country. This is far from trivial and requires looking at secondary sources, not just the laws themselves. Other problems include official vs. unofficial laws, slow consolidations, updates to the law (of various kinds) and attempting to normalize the world's laws to a US standard (like excluding municipal laws and avoiding guidance-type documents from civil law countries). These are problems Google doesn't have to deal with and customers expect a very high standard for legal search results.

palunon 10y ago

In France we have Legifrance, which is government run, and give you access to every France law, code, etc, and let you see modifications over times and where the article is cited (the "links"). Eg. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsessionid=3178D9B64C307BBB4A2D9CA27EE167A2.tpdila22v_1?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071154&idArticle=LEGIARTI000032655793&dateTexte=20170103&categorieLien=cid#LEGIARTI000032655793 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsession... It's probably made simpler by the fact that we are not a federation with law making bodies everywhere...

cakeface 10y ago

Another reason why it is difficult to create the "google" for the law is that some laws are copyrighted and are not in the public domain. Stop. Think about what I just said. There are laws that you must pay to read. A good example of this is when a state or municipality enacts a building code. A common building code is the electrical code published by NFPA. Most states use this. NFPA owns the copyright for this. You cannot publish a PDF of the electrical code on your website, yet you are required by law to follow it. There may be other cases of this, I don't know. But I think it is crazy!

josh5555 10y ago

There is. It is called "Google".

waspleg 10y ago

because money source: my dad was a lawyer for 20+ years.