4 ms·

Is there a U.S. equivalent?

Something1234 3y ago
Govinfo.gov and the house provides the entire us law corpus but it's weird
showerst 3y ago
The Feds have good sources for the all various admin code/statutes/slip laws/etc, but there’s not a great unified source for case law. There’s nothing at the state level right now. I’ve been considering setting up a statue scraper under the openstates umbrella but it’s a bit of daunting project to start. Lots of yeoman’s work parsing gnarly websites or evading Lexis scraper protections.
yieldcrv 3y ago
no, there's a lot that we need before we can even begin to improve this even with a database of current laws as they exist right now, the laws to change them primarily come in 2 forms: 1. verbatim additional laws 2. instructions that are essentially diffs to the current law. what words to change, strike out, sections to re-arrange and modify, as well as new lines of code. these have to be spliced in to the prior state of the law and after we have all that, laws are often following different logic. like logic gates. One set of laws may be using "and" as a set of conditions that must be satisfied all as one, but it also could be using "and" and an "exclusive or", a set of conditions where only one has to be satisfied. but when writing it, those things all flowed grammatically and harmonization of laws wasn't prioritized. there's a whole lot that can be improved that we don't have the infrastructure to do just yet. someone could do it, but that's the first step.
bentley 3y ago
PRO is a prominent player in the space. https://public.resource.org/ https://public.resource.org/ Notably, it’s thanks to them that in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled Georgia’s legal code, including annotations, is uncopyrightable.
ubutler 3y ago
There is! It’s called the [Pile of Law](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law), and it’s actually what inspired this project. The only caveat is that it doesn’t appear to be regularly updated, and so is more of a snapshot of US law rather than a semi-live copy. Also I’m not entirely sure how comprehensive it is (ie, whether there’s anything missing). For those interested in building a true US equivalent of my corpus, I think it could be a great starting point, particularly since they published the code they used to build it.

Govinfo.gov and the house provides the entire us law corpus but it's weird

The Feds have good sources for the all various admin code/statutes/slip laws/etc, but there’s not a great unified source for case law. There’s nothing at the state level right now. I’ve been considering setting up a statue scraper under the openstates umbrella but it’s a bit of daunting project to start. Lots of yeoman’s work parsing gnarly websites or evading Lexis scraper protections.

yieldcrv 3y ago

no, there's a lot that we need before we can even begin to improve this even with a database of current laws as they exist right now, the laws to change them primarily come in 2 forms: 1. verbatim additional laws 2. instructions that are essentially diffs to the current law. what words to change, strike out, sections to re-arrange and modify, as well as new lines of code. these have to be spliced in to the prior state of the law and after we have all that, laws are often following different logic. like logic gates. One set of laws may be using "and" as a set of conditions that must be satisfied all as one, but it also could be using "and" and an "exclusive or", a set of conditions where only one has to be satisfied. but when writing it, those things all flowed grammatically and harmonization of laws wasn't prioritized. there's a whole lot that can be improved that we don't have the infrastructure to do just yet. someone could do it, but that's the first step.

bentley 3y ago

PRO is a prominent player in the space. https://public.resource.org/ https://public.resource.org/ Notably, it’s thanks to them that in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled Georgia’s legal code, including annotations, is uncopyrightable.

ubutler 3y ago

There is! It’s called the [Pile of Law](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law), and it’s actually what inspired this project. The only caveat is that it doesn’t appear to be regularly updated, and so is more of a snapshot of US law rather than a semi-live copy. Also I’m not entirely sure how comprehensive it is (ie, whether there’s anything missing). For those interested in building a true US equivalent of my corpus, I think it could be a great starting point, particularly since they published the code they used to build it.