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Looks neat! I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, espec

Looks neat! I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, especially in very regulated areas, make use of “functions” “imported” from other, totally different laws. Sorry for being off-topic, but if anyone knows a resource for that, I am super interested!

ova-throwaway 5y ago
? baby lawyer and former dev here: don't we have that anyways? E.g. on Casetext, Lexis, all the usual legal research sites. I personally haven't encountered a situation where it was totally lacking.
- jandinter 5y ago
  Many available options seem to be based on manual annotation and, therefore, cover a limited range of all legal texts. Especially with regard to regulatory topics, those research sites usually fall short.
  - ss108 5y ago
    I would be interested to know where you're encountering these issues, specifically. I'm interested in legal tech, would like to know where the gaps are
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Many available options seem to be based on manual annotation I’m not sure there’s an alternative: if a reference to an other text is complete (and thus fully disambiguated) it’s reasonably easy to infer it, but if it’s only partial and thus ambiguous (e.g. Article 54) then it becomes a lot more problematic: what happens legally if the system misinterprets the reference (e.g. to the current law’s article 54 but nearby contextual clues made it clear that it was some other text’s) and the reader follows this misinterpretation?
masklinn 5y ago
> I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, especially in very regulated areas, make use of “functions” “imported” from other, totally different laws. I mean, it "is", to the extent that if you put in the work of hyperlinking all the things during the digitizing process they can be. Légifrance is fairly highly (though nowhere near completely) hyperlinked for instance, here's one of the laws I selected from the front page: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000044446848 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000044446848 Many (though nowhere near all) the legal texts being referenced, modified, or inserted (as references, into other texts) are hyperlinked.
earth_walker 5y ago
I started doing this for a niche area: US and European regulations and guidance documents for Good Laboratory Practice, and later for Canadian Cannabis regulations. Basically I created a standard XML schema for regulations and parsed them into XML [1]. This allowed for e.g. presenting tables of contents and section folding, pulling and linking definitions into their own search engine, etc. [2] I thought that I could easily write a parser for each jurisdiction's formats, and then get predicate rules and related regulations for free. I was wrong. a) there are many jurisdictions and sub-groups all doing their own thing; and b) most don't have any standard document formatting or tagging, let alone a defined structure. Even in the most structured formats (like the US eCFR's XML) the focus is on display rather than content. In the worst cases it was just whoever wrote up the Word document chose how they numbered and formatted chapters and sections etc. There were so many special cases that it was a huge amount of work to add or update each document, and I ended up doing a lot of categorization and fixing by hand. [1] I know people hate XML on HN, but I did my research and had specific reasons for choosing it at the time, including human readable, nesting sections, being able to easily publish and validate a schema, etc. [2] See ReadtheRegs.com. You can browse the definitions page without an account.
- jandinter 5y ago
  This looks great! I share your sentiment: I looked into the XML files for the published German legal texts[1], and they seem to be made for display purposes only. [1] Table of contents for XML files: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml
  - earth_walker 5y ago
    Crazy isn't it? I actually pitched to the American Society of Quality Assurance a few years ago that we should be going to the various governing jurisdictions with a schema and encourage them to publish regulations in a standard format. The benefits of treating regulations as data are enormous - not only do you have a standard way of consuming and linking regulatory requirements like in an API, you also get discoverability, the ability to make tools (syntax highlighting in legalese!), compile requirements over multiple jurisdictions, and more! I had difficulty selling the idea among the non-computer-savvy (but technical) regulatory professionals, but I'm sure a few of you on HN can imagine the benefits of having a tree-sitter for legal code... I could have pushed it further, taking the lead to pitch to the various regulators I work with in my consulting business, but in the end it was just too much work for a side project without interest from my peers.
dinobones 5y ago
This is already a thing: https://coparse.com https://coparse.com

ova-throwaway 5y ago

? baby lawyer and former dev here: don't we have that anyways? E.g. on Casetext, Lexis, all the usual legal research sites. I personally haven't encountered a situation where it was totally lacking.

jandinter 5y ago
Many available options seem to be based on manual annotation and, therefore, cover a limited range of all legal texts. Especially with regard to regulatory topics, those research sites usually fall short.
- ss108 5y ago
  I would be interested to know where you're encountering these issues, specifically. I'm interested in legal tech, would like to know where the gaps are
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Many available options seem to be based on manual annotation I’m not sure there’s an alternative: if a reference to an other text is complete (and thus fully disambiguated) it’s reasonably easy to infer it, but if it’s only partial and thus ambiguous (e.g. Article 54) then it becomes a lot more problematic: what happens legally if the system misinterprets the reference (e.g. to the current law’s article 54 but nearby contextual clues made it clear that it was some other text’s) and the reader follows this misinterpretation?

masklinn 5y ago

> I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, especially in very regulated areas, make use of “functions” “imported” from other, totally different laws. I mean, it "is", to the extent that if you put in the work of hyperlinking all the things during the digitizing process they can be. Légifrance is fairly highly (though nowhere near completely) hyperlinked for instance, here's one of the laws I selected from the front page: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000044446848 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000044446848 Many (though nowhere near all) the legal texts being referenced, modified, or inserted (as references, into other texts) are hyperlinked.

earth_walker 5y ago

I started doing this for a niche area: US and European regulations and guidance documents for Good Laboratory Practice, and later for Canadian Cannabis regulations. Basically I created a standard XML schema for regulations and parsed them into XML [1]. This allowed for e.g. presenting tables of contents and section folding, pulling and linking definitions into their own search engine, etc. [2] I thought that I could easily write a parser for each jurisdiction's formats, and then get predicate rules and related regulations for free. I was wrong. a) there are many jurisdictions and sub-groups all doing their own thing; and b) most don't have any standard document formatting or tagging, let alone a defined structure. Even in the most structured formats (like the US eCFR's XML) the focus is on display rather than content. In the worst cases it was just whoever wrote up the Word document chose how they numbered and formatted chapters and sections etc. There were so many special cases that it was a huge amount of work to add or update each document, and I ended up doing a lot of categorization and fixing by hand. [1] I know people hate XML on HN, but I did my research and had specific reasons for choosing it at the time, including human readable, nesting sections, being able to easily publish and validate a schema, etc. [2] See ReadtheRegs.com. You can browse the definitions page without an account.

jandinter 5y ago
This looks great! I share your sentiment: I looked into the XML files for the published German legal texts[1], and they seem to be made for display purposes only. [1] Table of contents for XML files: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml
- earth_walker 5y ago
  Crazy isn't it? I actually pitched to the American Society of Quality Assurance a few years ago that we should be going to the various governing jurisdictions with a schema and encourage them to publish regulations in a standard format. The benefits of treating regulations as data are enormous - not only do you have a standard way of consuming and linking regulatory requirements like in an API, you also get discoverability, the ability to make tools (syntax highlighting in legalese!), compile requirements over multiple jurisdictions, and more! I had difficulty selling the idea among the non-computer-savvy (but technical) regulatory professionals, but I'm sure a few of you on HN can imagine the benefits of having a tree-sitter for legal code... I could have pushed it further, taking the lead to pitch to the various regulators I work with in my consulting business, but in the end it was just too much work for a side project without interest from my peers.

dinobones 5y ago

This is already a thing: https://coparse.com https://coparse.com