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I did a little side project where I tracked the partisan lean of each state over the years. I wanted to do a thing where I plot markers for every year where the
by culi 4y ago
I did a little side project where I tracked the partisan lean of each state over the years. I wanted to do a thing where I plot markers for every year where there was a major law passed that affected voting access in some way
I was SHOCKED how difficult it is to access public law in the majority of states. And even more shocked about how little academic research and resources there are about this particular study. I found it difficult to find studies that compared laws in multiple states in general. I assume the reason for this is mostly to do with lack of quality databases and resources for this.
- nicbou 4y agoGermany has gesetze-im-internet.de. All federal laws are there, in plain, linkable HTML. I link to this website all the time. They even have English translations of some parts. The city of Berlin has their own version, although I find it unusable. It's slow, and hard to reliably link to.
- fweimer 4y agogesetze-im-internet.de is operated by juris GmbH. They used to claim exclusive rights for their custom-made consolidated versions, and I believe they still claim something like that for historic versions available through their commercial subscription. (It so happens that juris also runs gesetze.berlin.de.) These juris versions are often viewed as authoritative, despite being made by a private company outside of the legislative process. There's another completely non-official website called buzer.de, which handles this so much better. If you want to read the actual law as published, that's another commercial service (Bundesgesetzblatt, run by Bundesanzeiger Verlag), and there, the company claims protection rights as a database work. You are expected to buy a subscription if you want to print or search the PDF files they offer for viewing, or apparently for any kind of non-personal use. Unlike gesetze-im-internet.de and despite its commercial nature, Bundesgesetzblatt is an official federal publication.
- arlcode 4y agoGesetzte im Internet is published by the ministry of Justice According to https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/impressum.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/impressum.html is "just" providing the technical infrastructure(?). There is also dejure which is 100%. Am I missing something. The commercial Bundesgesetzblatt is a scandal indeed
- fweimer 4y agoI don't think the BMJ or other parts of the feral government have in-sourced the editorial process. Historically, juris claimed copyright-like protection for the consolidated text, as can be seen here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060826035858/http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hinweise.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060826035858/http://www.gesetz... I think producing consolidated text is viewed by large parts of the legal community as “just typing”, similar to early attitudes towards programming, which is why few people care. Most of the controversy around juris is about access to court decisions.
- tiahura 4y agoWhat state doesn’t have their statutes online?
- esbranson 4y agoAll states have their laws, regulations, and jurisprudence online like North Korea has freedom of speech. Technically yes, but effectively no.
- tiahura 4y agoWhat other topics are you horribly misinformed about? http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/alison/codeofalabama/1975/coatoc.htm http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/alison/codeofalabama... https://www.akleg.gov/basis/statutes.asp https://www.akleg.gov/basis/statutes.asp https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ArkansasLaw https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ArkansasLaw I think every municipality has them online as well.
- esbranson 4y agoHow many words do any of those have? A simple word count. Like any word processor can provide circa 1980.
- tiahura 4y agoA bunch? How is word count relevant?
- esbranson 4y agoIt’s a simple function that operates on the entire set of data, not just a sample. You cannot do even a simple function on the entire set of data. Your examples are piecemeal samples, not the law. You can’t do a simple word count of the law because you do not have access to the law.
- culi 4y agoOh they have them online. Some in terrible pdfs or on sites that are randomly down with no warning. Rarely do you get good text search. God bless you if you're expecting some sort of API The biggest surprise to me however was the lack of any well-organized effort to centralize all of these. To have them all in one API and make it easy to compare across states or get basic data around what gets passed when, who voted for what, etc. The latter information is sometimes not even available