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Github: United States Code
- daeken 14y agoInteresting project. My first thought was: Great, changelogs! But then I started thinking a bit deeper and realized that what I'd love to see happen (on a related note) is a site/repository where you can see not only the legislation but the relevant case law over time.
- NatW 14y agoThe perfect match might be my friend Mike's awesome and free open source project: He's improving it all the time and would welcome contribution: http://courtlistener.com http://courtlistener.com It originated as a graduate school project of his at the UC Berkeley School of Information. It would be great if they inter-operated.
- thinkcomp 14y agoWe are working on this at http://www.plainsite.org http://www.plainsite.org.
- azernik 14y agoFunny tidbit - in the first statute in Title I, Chapter 1 (basically top-level definitions - "Words denoting number, gender, and so forth") it was considered important to include among the 10 definitions the following: 'the words "insane" and "insane person" and "lunatic" shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis;' Interesting that that was considered to be up there with the legal definitions of "person", "officer", "oath", and "writing".
- crusso 14y agoFascinating. I love it. Just looking through the comments here and at some of documents, I've learned a few tidbits that I never realized before. Right below the part you referenced: > the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, > companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and > joint stock companies, as well as individuals; So, there's a justification for the Citizens United decision right there. Congress said it was so in the definitions of Title 1, Chapter 1. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that. Still interesting, though. If Congress wants to change the CU implications, they can start by changing that definition right there.
- saraid216 14y agoI'm guessing that's necessary to provide the basis for the insanity plea.
- m0skit0 14y agoVery nice idea if there was a REAL democracy, but I doubt this will be suitable to the law-makers, because most of them don't want people to know how this process is, let alone know what laws are being discussed, and even worse, who and what did he/she patch...
- crusso 14y agoWhat you say is very true. Dunno why people downvote a little truth when it's stated clearly. If what you said didn't have a strong grain of truth in it, then there would be no need for this project. Our laws would naturally be more straightforward, clearly written, and better organized because they're so important to society. There are some really strong forces that oppose simple and clear laws. Some of them are more natural results of maintaining a complex system. My feeling is that a lot of the code ugliness is due to the selfish needs of those in power. In HN terms, the current system is Proprietary. This GitHub project is looking to add some Open Source goodness to the mix. I think it's a really wonderful idea, since the very act of shining light into the enormously daunting spaghetti code that we have to live by every day may help to wake people up to the unneeded obscurities, contradictions, redundancies, anachronisms, wastes, and outright abuses of power.
- damncabbage 14y agoThere was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653
- newhouseb 14y agoNote the author is talking about SVN and not git. I haven't used SVN nearly as much as I have git but from what I understand git is likely better suited for combining many different change-sets into many combinations efficiently (according to Git's Wikipedia page it was designed with "non-linearity" in mind), which would seem to mitigate the some of the issues around merge conflicts the OP brings up with respect to SVN.
- gioele 14y agoI was referring to SVN because when I started working in this field SVN was the up-and-coming SCM. You can s/SVN/git/g and still get the same result. Versioning the text of the law is not a problem. It is a solved problem. Every decent legal office has access to a versioned text of the law. The new challenge is the versioning of the legal content (or _meaning_ if you want) and the (semi-) automatic creation of consolidated texts at a certain point in time. The last point is difficult because the consolidated version is not a single document but a set of possible documents. See also the other answer I gave on the difference between text and content: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023109 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023109
- newhouseb 14y agoI see, your post of 'meaning' vs 'text' makes the issue(s) a lot clearer - thanks. What other meaning conflicts might arise other than time-related ones? I think with some clever tagging combined with a script on top of git one could have something tell you "show me what law as it is applicable today - not everything that's been passed for the future" Cherry picking commits and branching on every possible merge conflict (and picking one winner for each branch) should be relatively straightforward, I guess the question is how big of a set of possible documents might this be - 10? 100? 1000? Would this be a process done by lawyers for the purposes of understanding laws on the books or by someone in the legislature at the end of each session? Apologies if I'm ignorant on this stuff - I'm just really interested.
- felipe_csl 14y agoI'd like to see people forking and making suggestions to that, opening pull requests etc.
- malkia 14y agoIn the near future: - http://github.com/senate http://github.com/senate - http://github.com/president http://github.com/president
- ryancarson 14y agoThis is a great idea, but won't work because legal text is so obtuse. We need plain-english wording on all this in order for everyone to interact with it.
- miniatureape 14y agoI've always wondered if it were preferable to have some more formal legal language to remove ambiguities. Would writing laws or parts of laws as 'programs' help cut out loop holes in say, tax law?
- Lukeas14 14y agoProblem is there isn't an efficient enough 'compiler'. To see if a law works it has to be tested in court, a long, expensive process.
- conanite 14y agoThe Court is the VM
- crusso 14y agoBut isn't that true of almost every physical system? In weather forecasting, for example, you can't have a deterministic algorithm that accounts for the impact of every air molecule and calorie of energy in the atmosphere. Instead, Scientists come up with statistical models that give us a "good enough" picture of weather for our purposes of predicting whether or not a hurricane may be heading our way or if we should plan on a picnic over the weekend. The beauty of it is that Scientists aren't really political about short-term weather forecasting. (I won't get into long-range climatology politics :) The models are either shown to work better than other available ones or they're tweaked or replaced. Maybe we need a similar approach to law making. If you create a tax or spending law, it needs to be an input into our economic models. Economic models need to be open sourced and running constantly with complete transparency on the inputs and outputs. Over time, we should improve those models like we have on the weather ones so that they give us the best picture we can have on how financial laws will change the Economy. Likewise, we should model the impact of other laws on prison populations, crime rates, inflation, test scores, etc. Let's decrease the demagoguing and the politicking all these issues and start getting to the science of them. Sure, we'll still have debates on what we want the outputs to look like, but at least we could focus the debates more on the outcomes that we want to see rather than on what it would take to get us there.
- generateui 14y agoI placed the 2010 Dutch Pirate Party (Piratenpartij) election program on Github. I try to elad by example: Set the example by the "internet party", then hopefully others copy & paste it. https://github.com/generateui/VerkiezingsProgrammaPiratenPartij2010 https://github.com/generateui/VerkiezingsProgrammaPiratenPar...
- blibble 14y agothe UK parliament basically does this already: here's an example of an act that's been modified: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/41/79?timeline=true http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/41/79?timeline=true and an example of a bill going through parliament: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/financeno4/documents.html http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/financeno4/docum...
- lloeki 14y agoFrance has a similar, web-wrapped project: http://legifrance.gouv.fr/ http://legifrance.gouv.fr/ It started small and iteratively adds more and more features. I always envisioned some access to this through something like git or Time Machine.
- gioele 14y agoPlease note that there is clear distinction between the timeline of the text of an act, its enacting process and its legal content (the legal "meaning"). The text and process timelines (the easiest to create and visualize) are interesting from a journalistic point of view but useless from a legal point of view. You rarely care about the text of an act at a certain point. What you really care about is the state of the law, the sum of all the _effects_ of all _acts_ in a precise moment. For example it may be interesting to know that on 31st December 2011 an act as been enacted that says that on the 1st of July the new tax code will be amended to read "The taxation level is 10%" instead of the previous "The taxation level is 30%", but what I really want to know is "what is the taxation level today, 25th of May?". Taking only the text into account will not give you the correct answer. What you need is a more complex system that "merges" all the intended actions written in the acts into a (mostly) coherent state of the law. Versioning the text of the law is not difficult, neither has been difficult since the days of CVS. The hard task is to extract the legal meaning from the text and create time-and-context-bound actions from that.
- blibble 14y agoyes, you're right in that versioning is not technically difficult, but getting the establishment to consider doing it (let alone actually doing it) is a major milestone.
- neilkelty 14y agoLove the "idea". This has been written about extensively on Quora with some very interesting discussion. * http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-science http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-... * http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-nontechnical-barriers-to-adopting-a-version-control-system-for-use-in-writing-bills-new-laws http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-nontechnical-barriers-to-a... I fear we'll find out that we really didn't want to know how the sausage is made.
- there 14y agoWhile it might be useful to have these in revision control, their format won't work as-is. Take this change for instance: https://github.com/divegeek/uscode/commit/4b58ecaa6a6ea4b15820208878c702d6e26e5b9f https://github.com/divegeek/uscode/commit/4b58ecaa6a6ea4b158... Lots and lots of lines that don't change anything useful, and then the one change is hard to understand because it's wrapping a bunch of words causing extra changes. I would recommend un-wrapping lines before commits and then have the presentation app smart enough to not show all of the lines where just a date in a header changed, doing word wrapping on the client side. Also, without commit information, the changes are hard to wade through. Are there summaries or titles of the bills that can be used in the commit message? Who are the authors that drafted the bill and who are the "committers" that voted for it?
- afthonos 14y agoThis idea keeps cropping up, and it terrifies me beyond all reason. It's roughly as palatable as a direct democracy, because in effect, that's what it advocates. People who deeply care about the law are already able, and willing, to find the information they need; I'm all for making it easier to manage, and there are worthy projects in that respect, but by no means do I want ordinary citizens to start dabbling in legislation. The Founding Fathers' romantic notions notwithstanding, running a government that provides important services to 350 million people isn't a side-job—it's a full-time job, and arguably a career. Heaping disdain on career politicians is absurd: if they're good at their job, of course they should make a career out of it. Which brings me to the idea underlying all these posts: that by keeping close tabs on the intricate details of lawmaking, we can ensure that they will do a good job. I have heard this argument before. It came from this guy who wasn't really a coder, but wanted to keep close tabs on what the coders that worked for him did. So he started asking them to log in all their hours, with messages explaining what they were doing. And he started looking at the commits in the VCS so that he would see the actual code. Of course, when he didn't like something he would criticize. He would threaten people with getting fired if they didn't code according to his standards. The coders tried to explain that sometimes things have to be done in a way that's different from the "common sense" way, and sometimes he was even reasonable about it, but he still was not a coder, so he had no way of knowing what was involved. That's who we're trying to become with projects like these. The most pointy-haired of pointy haired bosses. Our pointy hair wants points of its own, and all because we try to hold people accountable. That's a canard. We want to hold politians accountable because we feel they are irresponsible. But what about our responsibility? Who hired these irresponsible politicians to steward us? We did. Instead of looking for ways to make politicians accountable, let's look for ways to make ourselves responsible. I would start, on an individual basis, by taking ownership of our part of the equation: our vote. Remember: "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility is subtracted" -- Pasi Sahlberg Let's find projects that restore our responsibility. From that, the rest will follow.
- Aqua_Geek 14y ago> Who hired these irresponsible politicians to steward us? We did. Isn't there some value in making people more aware of what these "irresponsible" politicians are doing then, so that we don't keep lazily voting them in again and again? Yes, those who care about the law are probably already involved. Shouldn't we be trying to get more people to care, though? More people getting the information from the source instead of having their opinions formed for them by the news anchor is a good thing, IMHO.
- sailfast 14y agoWould putting each legislator's changes in the open help their ability to compromise on difficult issues or hinder it? Sometimes it's easier to do the hard thing if nobody can be pegged as directly responsible. That said, I suppose each committee could use pay for a subscription to do their markup "behind closed doors" before the final pull request hehe.
- rockLAWbster 14y agoEvery businessperson should get to know a law librarian! Very insightful on where to find statutes and codes. Free research too!
- zashapiro 14y agoCan you imagine how helpful diffs would be in the legislative process? Instead of combing through hundreds of pages to find new changes, losses, amendments, etc., it would all be right there. Let's open source the law.
- ahorak 14y agoIt would be interesting to fork this and apply a simple and democratic amendment system that allows all followers (or some other defined and growing population like Hacker News) to vote on changes. I say we use a strict majority to determine the acceptance of these amendments and forge a document that reflects the multitude of views in the hacker news community. What would be the results, both realistically and idealistically, I wonder?