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

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/