
GitLaw: GitHub For Laws And Legal Documents - A Tourniquet For American Liberty - waffle_ss
http://blog.abevoelker.com/gitlaw-github-for-laws-and-legal-documents-a-tourniquet-for-american-liberty/
======
ynniv
This is one of those ideas that gets suggested on a frequent basis. Those who
suggest it often think that the problem is one of complexity management, like
managing source code changes.

The actual problem is one of power and intention. Yes, version control would
make earmarks obvious. Yes, it would make tracking contributors (lobbies)
easier. Yes, it would make tailoring tried and trusted legal documents easy.

All of these are reasons why version control will never be applied to the law.
We want these things, but we are not the customer. The real customer is
actively trying to prevent these things from ever happening.

The reality is that these tools are probably already being used for these
exact purposes - in private, and for personal gain.

~~~
Cushman
I agree 100%, but I think that's only the short view-- the extant governments
aren't going to be around forever, and in the long run we need smart people to
spend time thinking about how to structure a government that's learned from
our mistakes.

Of course we won't see Congress outlaw lobbying, but there's definitely an
opportunity today to try some of these concepts in an organization, community,
or even willing local government.

~~~
newbie12
Congress can't outlaw lobbying, it is a core Constitutional right (free
speech, right to assemble, right to petition govt).

The problem is that the government is too big and has too much power, so the
rewards for lobbying are so great.

------
gioele
Law is a very, very, very hard task to tackle properly.

You may not know but there have been three big "generations" of law systems.
Many parliaments are starting to use fourth generation systems. Third and
fourth generation systems look a lot like a complex git, but there are many
things that should and do work differently.

When I started dealing with these things I thought that it was a solved
problem, just use SVN (the cool kid at the time) and everything will be
solved. Well, none of the existing versioning models work well with law
documents, especially acts. The general ideas do apply, but many of the
details do not. For example, just think of a merge conflict: who are you so
solve a merge a conflict? What you have to do is to just record the conflict
and create two parallel universes, one in which the conflict has been resolved
using branch A and another one in which the conflict is resolved using branch
B. You then keep these two universes alive and apply all the later changes
twice. You have to do this until a judge or a legal body declares one of the
"branches" the correct one; this may take years and the decision reverted
(even partially) many times.

A few links to relevant standards and systems:

* Legal XML: <http://www.legalxml.org/> An OASIS working group that is merging all the relevant national standards into a worldwide standard. * Akoma Ntoso: <http://www.akomantoso.org/> A UN/DESA-sponsored format for legal documents. * CEN Metalex: <http://www.leibnizcenter.org/> a meta-format that acts as an exchange format between legacy formats and new systems. * LexML: <http://projeto.lexml.gov.br/documentacao/resumo-em-ingles> A huge Akoma Ntoso-based repository of Brazilian laws. * ICA/SPP: [http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliam...](http://www.ica.org/792/about-section-for-archives-of-parliaments-and-political-parties-spp/about-parliamentary-and-political-party-archives-spp.html) The groups of archivists that deals with all the fine points you have to deal with when archiving laws and dealing with legal documents in general.

The main international conference on Law and IT is Jurix, it started in 1988.
Check out their proceedings to see how things evolved over time.

If you are interested in hacking something related to laws or legal documents
(judgements, parliamentary debate records, historical versions of laws) just
get in contact with me.

Disclaimer: I work in this field and I am related to some of these systems.

~~~
harshreality
What do you do about bills which refer to existing laws, with instructions to
"strike blah" and "insert foo before x in section xxx of this chapter"?

Maybe it's possible to parse that and apply that sort of bill most of the
time, but I'd be surprised if it were possible to do so reliably (unless
natural language processing becomes a solved problem) (or perhaps I'm
overestimating the complexity of legislative language and converting
legislation into a patch against existing law is not a hard problem).

The first step, however, could be to do revision control of bills, blind to
references to existing law.

Representing bills as patches to current body of law is the endgame, but I
think simple revision control of bills as they wind through the legislative
process would add a lot of value and would be relatively straightforward.

~~~
DennisP
Go the opposite direction. Make changes to existing law, run a diff, convert
the diff into "strike blah, insert foo" format, and that's your bill.

~~~
gioele
The EU parliament has an amendments systems that does exactly that:
[https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/european-parliament-
share-a...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/european-parliament-share-
amendment-web-tool-open-source) .

------
nathanhammond
I've dreamed up something like this as well and realistically there isn't
anything preventing us from using git to manage our laws. As a strawman to
beat up, here is an example of how it could work:

    
    
        git clone legislature/generalstatutes
        s/marijuana/sugar/g
        git commit -am "Turn sugar into a controlled substance."
        git request-pull
    
        Legislators
        If interested, # git branch bill_12345
        git pull nathanhammond/generalstatutes
        // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill.
    
        Spin off to committee (read/write to committee members)
        git clone legislature/generalstatutes
        git checkout bill_12345
        // Continue editing the "Sugar as a controlled substance" bill.
        git commit -am "Committee updates."
    
        Take a vote for leaving committee.
        If successful, # git request-pull
    
        General legislature takes a vote.
        If successful, # git merge bill_12345 master --signoff (Legislators that voted for it.)
    
    

Benefits:

\- Encourages broader participation in democracy.

\- Cryptographically signed. We'll know if you voted for or wrote it.

\- Tracks history of all changes (at least at the commit level). If something
comes out of committee very different from how it went in you can easily find
every change.

\- Makes it easier for newspeople to identify how the law is changing.

\- An interface like GitHub over top of the repository could hide all of the
complexity, allow for line-by-line comments, and general comments.

\- Registering to the interface with your voter ID could allow for
representatives to identify or poll constituents.

Problems:

\- Requires behavioral change for legislators who I would not necessarily
classify as "early adopters."

\- Still possible to "launder" the creator by having somebody else make the
changes for you.

\- In place modification of the law. To this point when something is repealed
it typically looks something like this:
[http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySect...](http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySection/Chapter_153/GS_153-1_through_153-382.html)

------
rmc
Won't change anything. It's proposing a technical solution to a people
problem.

Right now laws are openly available, but people don't care enough to get look
into them. Also, just because you have "git blame" doesn't mean you'll now
magically be able to see what corporate lobbyist wrote the law, because they'd
just ask the legislator to commit it instead. Wouldn't change anything.

~~~
draggnar
but at the same time it is kind of a technical problem.

one big reason why people don't look at the laws is because they get changed
all the time without a transparant way to see what ends up getting changed
right before a vote. something like gitlaw would allow people, and lawyers, to
track changes to laws much easier.

adoption is definitely the problem, but this can help lawyers make proposals
and counterproposals with the speed of software developers, which may give
lawyers a reason to sign on.

~~~
amalag
So it's still a people problem, a 'gitlaw' would keep track of who changed
what. You would still have to find out who did what.

------
lazerwalker
This is a laudable idea.

Unfortunately, the key challenge with the problem isn't architecting a DVCS-
like service for legal documents (for an MVP, you could easily get by simply
designing a novel frontend to git), it's an adoption problem. The current
system is flawed, yes, but merely offering a superior product for less money
isn't enough to make a dent in the bureaucratic nightmare of modern-day
Washington.

I'm reminded of an article I saw here on HN a few months back:
[http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-
its-n...](http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-
longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-)

~~~
gordianknot
Adoption isn't the problem. We don't need Congress to use such a system
initially; we need bills, the US Code, etc. mirrored on Github. When it's
there, people will get it. The information is out there, it just needs to be
processed into a usable form so that it works with Git. And it'd take millions
of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's going to do it.

~~~
sc68cal
>And it'd take millions of dollars, and have no conventional ROI, so no one's
going to do it.

Your pessimism is unwarranted. There is already one user on GitHub that
scrapes the US Code and mirrors it. He even tags the changes so you can diff
them quite easily.

<https://github.com/divegeek/uscode>

~~~
a3camero
It also wouldn't have $0 ROI because there are people who will pay for
advanced services built around the law-making process.

Here's an example of a service built on Ontario laws (disclosure: I made it):
www.ontariomonitor.ca. It emails people when a bill passes a committee or when
new laws are introduced (+ lots of other stuff).

------
reinhardt
In addition to this being first and foremost a political/people problem as
many have pointed out, the technical challenges of applying standard CMS and
document management solutions to legislation environments are pretty much
unknown or underestimated by most of us. For those interested, Sean McGrath
has posted a series of posts addressing some of these challenges:
[http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in-
legislaturepa...](http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/xml-in-
legislatureparliament.html)

------
iandanforth
May I suggest that code wins arguments? _If_ this is a better way to do
things, than starting with a small town that's about to incorporate could
demonstrate that this could work.

Not the best list of such towns, but a starting point:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities#Unbuilt_or_under_construction_planned_cities)

------
kemiller
I basically agree with everyone pouring cold water on this as far as reforming
the statute law system is concerned. That is a much more entrenched problem
than any computer system is going to solve overnight.

However, I do see a niche for DIY contract law. Sort of like Nolo Press on
steroids. Where you can browse standard contracts and then modify them to suit
your needs in a visible and traceable way. Or possibly for contract
negotiations, where each party makes changes. This would keep track of history
in a neutral and verifiable way. (Could save time and errors for individuals
and small law firms....)

------
vnorby
You can use GitHub for legal documents already. Just convert your documents to
markdown. We put our TOS and Privacy Policy on Github from launch:
<https://github.com/everyme/everyme-legal>

We haven't had any issues or pull requests recently but we would welcome them
for sure.

------
newbusox
This is a fine goal, however, beyond what other have said here, it's important
to realize that a lot of "laws" or "rules" that impact individuals on a day to
day basis are not created by Congress at all--in fact, they're created via
administrative agencies through rulemaking processes (see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking>). This is where the "rubber meets
the road" of actually implementing broadly worded language that Congress has
passed, and how these rules are promulgated can be vastly different from how
Congress operates. For one, administrative agency rulemaking is almost always
open to public comment and, by law, these agencies are obligated to take into
considerations comments left by the public.

In a number of ways the process is more open and participatory than
legislative law making, and, as mentioned, the regulations passed often have
more of a direct impact on day to day life. There are a number of solutions
out there that are attempting to make this process more transparent and
participatory: for example, <http://regulationroom.org/> (operated by a clinic
at Cornell law school). In my opinion, informing the public of the importance
and participatory nature of rulemaking (and getting more people involved) is
probably a more realistically achievable goal than the proposed solution, and
would likely have more tangible effect.

------
lux
It makes a lot of sense for there to be a standardized, open framework for
document management in general outside of source code. So many industries
could improve their processes and transparency through tools like Git and
services like GitHub, but they would need to be made a lot simpler than
GitHub's UI. Their site has some great stuff going for developers, but scares
away a few designers I know. I'd love to see a site/app like that get made.

------
farnsworth
Neat idea, but is it currently really a problem to tell who has written what
part of a law? Isn't this public information already? If not, then this isn't
a technology problem, and it will not be easy to convince our congresscritters
to keep track of who writes precisely what. And what about sections of law
with shared credit, or law that comes from a committee that didn't unanimously
agree, etc.

I know very little about how law is written, but my impression is that most
people who pay attention to it are more concerned about the large ideas than
the exact wordings - that's how you have politicians voting on bills when they
haven't read every word. How can they when it's thousands of pages long?

So this might be more useful to a small number of politicians and lawyers who
are examining law closely, looking for loopholes, or concerned about the exact
details of a particular statement's pedigree, but I don't really see the
general appeal.

I would rather have a tool which provides similar information, but on a higher
level. An independent overview in layman language, general information about
how it came about, how it's significant historically or with respect to
existing law, and with the option to drill down to the actual language and
gritty details. Of course, this would take much more work to build and
maintain. I've been a fan of opencongress.org but I've found that switching
between opencongress and wikipedia is the most effective way to understand the
context and significance of a bill.

Reading the actual text of a law is usually about as useful to me for
determining its implications as reading the source code of a printer driver
would be to my dad for figuring out how to install a printer.

~~~
gauravk92
Bills used to not be 1000 page tomes. Special interests usually cause that
bloat by lobbying for exemptions or credits in special circumstances. There's
no real reason it has to be 2000 pages, it's not going to be three pages
either though.

------
msgilligan
GitLaw, if implemented, would be a significant improvement over law by gits --
which is what we have now.

Unfortunately, I don't think the problem (with Congress) is technological. If
GitLaw were implemented, a lobbyist wouldn't be making a pull request
directly, they'd influence someone to do it for them so it wouldn't be
traceable -- which is pretty much the way it works now.

~~~
dgregd
> hey'd influence someone to do it for them so

Because now there are hundreds of people to check. We don't known exactly who
did what.

With GitLow there will be one direct person responsible.

SCM helps a lot with source code. Imagine 400 people software project without
SCM.

------
fourspace
Great idea. Wasn't Docracy pitched as exactly this, "GitHub for legal docs"?
Looks like it's morphed into something entirely different. Shame.

<http://docracy.com>

~~~
pents90
It hasn't morphed, we just don't market it on the homepage as "GitHub for
Legal Docs" since lawyers and the general public have no idea what that is.
But it is open-sourced legal docs, with versioning, diffs and a Github-style
ownership/branching model.

John (Co-Founder of Docracy)

------
jph
Hypothes.is is great for this -- see <http://hypothes.is>.

"A distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of
information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined
with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will
work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs,
scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation
and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the
underlying site.

"It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents
currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium
that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards
Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of
academic institutions.

~~~
neilk
I don't see how hypothes.is has anything to do with this... that project seems
to be about annotating any content. (And incidentally, universal annotation
systems are paradigmatic chicken and egg problem; people keep trying to do
this and it never reaches broad adoption).

Github for law is a much more modest and realizable idea, by comparison.

~~~
jph
> how hypothes.is has anything to do with this

Hypothes.is annotations are great for legal content, and are similar to the
stated goal of the GitLaw project -- namely to see how the laws are created,
modified, debated, and by whom.

------
borderbandit
Abe, interesting idea and one I would like to run with. @nicholascloud, you
make a good point about the “baby-sitting” of documents but I believe it can
be resolved by crowd-sourcing the project with a “vested” membership
interested in seeing the project succeed. This would also allow for
controlling the abuse of the site by spammers. One part of the project would
be converting the bloated material into something readable for the average
participant. Because the material editor will be working on something he, or
she is interested in then it would be a labor that they would happily engage
in.

@michael, you make a valid point but I believe a crowd-sourced vested
individuals like Wikimedia would work in keeping the problems at bay.

@tobi, I would suggest that the concept be kept private and not government
controlled as any government initiative would only create a bureaucracy that
would stifle innovation and open discourse.

My country, Mexico is going through a national referendum right now with the
drug war as a backdrop and part of the drama. Although it is a national
election I call it a referendum because the results will give an insight into
what our country wants in terms of dealing with the narco-types. Will we
continue with the strategy, increase the engagement or back-off and let them
do as they please?

My original idea was to crowd-source political commentary/analysis but your
post is making me expand the concept to include your idea.

The initial countries I would like to include are the United States and Mexico
as I have a basic understanding of their political processes but I would love
for it to include as many countries as possible.

I noticed that there is a lot of interest in this concept/idea and therefore I
want to officially put out a call for those interested in forming such a site.
I am willing to put up server space, domain name (polit.co) and initial
programming. With Abe’s permission and hopefully, his participation I have a
created a Twitter handle @polit_co to start the organizing. I look forward to
everyone’s participation. Let’s get this going.

------
pron
Democracy Is for Amateurs: Why We Need More Citizen Citizens -
[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democrac...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/democracy-
is-for-amateurs-why-we-need-more-citizen-citizens/256818/)

------
ap22213
Great idea, and seems to be a relatively wide-spread one, at that. But, as
others have mentioned, it faces steep adoption challenges.

I recommend taking a look at Rogers' 5 Factors of Adoption [1] as a starting
point. It would be extremely challenging to get this approach adopted from the
top down, especially in an entrenched democratic system. Instead, a less risky
approach may be to first get it successfully applied at the small scale. For
instance, can you get a small township/incorporation to adopt this method?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations>

------
saizai
Hi everyone!

I'm working on a project called <http://makeyourlaws.org>. It's open source
and non profit. Simply put, it's a practical project that aims to completely
replace existing legislatures with online liquid democracies, through
incremental steps within the existing legal system that have real teeth all
the way. No waiting for a revolution and no begging. Read the site & its G+
page for details.

In particular having a git for laws is going to be a necessary backend system
— along with e.g. pretty diff, blame, mass import, in-browser editor, simple
markup language for laws, etc.

MYL is not git-based as it were — the policy authoring process is discussion-
and voting-based, as it's a fundamentally different process than code
authoring — but once it _does_ get to being about laws, git is a good model.

There are of course also a number of other subprojects within MYL, like legal
identity verification, empathy-creating discussion systems, factchecking,
privacy-preserving voter-verifiable auditable-in-aggregate cryptographic vote
proofs, etc etc.

If you're interested in working on git-law, or online liquid democracy in
general, please contact me either by email to makeyourlaws@saizai.com or
posting a comment at
[https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65j...](https://plus.google.com/100183759660923071401/posts/NQVuM65jZqp)

We're making it happen.

------
grantcv1
I've been doing version management of law for 10 years. As Gioele said, (Hi
Gioele!) it is a very very hard task to tackle. The problem is the 200+ years
of tradition that you must drag along. In a prior life I've done version
management for CAD data and software data. Those are both much simpler
problems, largely because changes in procedures are so much easier when you
don't have such a large legacy. As someone said, legislation is all about
patching the law - although the more polite term is "amending" the law. While
I have built and deployed a system to automate the generation of amendments
and the compilation of law, building such a system to the more general case is
mind boggling. For this to be accomplished, there is going to have to be a lot
of buy-in from the legislatures themselves for they are going to have to be
willing to change. That is the challenge - change at that level is a bit
glacial. In the meantime, I am writing an HTML5 based legislative editor to at
least get some substance behind the idea - it's at <http://legalhacks.org>.
I'll post a video on how it works tomorrow. It's still a bit fragile too -
this stuff is hard.

------
nickpinkston
IANAL, but...

Why don't we instead build a "Startup Law Standard" kind of thing that can get
network effects in the startup scene. Get all the big firms law firm / VCs /
angels / etc. signed on to these standards.

How would this look? I've read a lot of contracts, and you see some similar
stuff. In many ways, it's kind of like programming:

VARIABLE DEFINITIONS: at the top - like: "'Company' shall be XYZ, Inc., a
Delaware Corporation located in 100 Main St.", and so on.

TESTS: These are normally "Warranties and Representations" - these are often
quite boiler-plate like: "Assignor is owner of all Intellectual Property",
etc.

AUTHENTICATION: Signatures, etc.

I bet that 80-90% documents could be generated by a set of 500 boiler-plate
sections with fill-in-the-blank type of stuff. There could be built into these
something that'd figure out the incompatibility (i.e. "exclusive" in one
section wouldn't work with "non-exclusive" in another).

Term Sheets are pretty standardized now with a couple made forms that are
considered modern. Why can't we do the rest?

Call me crazy, but couldn't this at the very least reduce law costs, and at
best be the first step down a road of nearly full-auto law?

Then again - IANAL...

~~~
rprasad
I hate to break it to you, but most of the legal documents you pay for _are
already standardized_. They have been for years (or decades, depending on the
area of law). You're paying for the customizations that are specific to your
situation.

Obviously, standardized language has done nothing to reduce costs. The problem
is supply-side: despite the glut of (new) lawyers, there are still not enough
lawyers that people are willing to trust with their business.

~~~
nickpinkston
Well I know that - I'm asking why can't it be codified more so it's more
consistent and able to be interacted with. The issue with lack of "trustable"
lawyers could perhaps be improved by such a tool?

------
javajosh
This can be done, and in fact there is a business in it too: an open source
competitor to Lexis and Westlaw. Data entry is bound to be a problem, as no-
one is going to want to give up electronic data, but I for one would be
willing to spend a few hours a week transcribing documents at the local
courthouse.

~~~
a3camero
You might enjoy the free legal data service offered in Canada that has most of
the cases that you can find on Westlaw/Lexis: canlii.org. It could be more
open, but it's free and works well.

------
lisper
Anyone interested in this should check out:

<http://www.plainsite.org/>

------
mrweasel
I like the idea. I've been wanting to do something similar for the laws here
in Denmark, but getting good data is tricky.... Strangely enough.

My reasoning is that I feel that politicians are constantly filling with
existing laws and the changes are conveyed via strang legal terms, e.g. "This
changes "they to us in paragraph five, section 2, line 3". This is a complete
bullshit way of informing the public about the changes to our laws. If laws
where tracked the same way we as developers track our code, hiding even minor
changes would be impossible. Just imagine getting a daily / weekly change log
for the laws passed by your government. Even our lazy journalists should be
able to dig up something in appropriate every now and then if they knew what
changed.

Wonderful idea.

~~~
tonfa
Most country with a codification system also publish consolidated codes, so
you don't have to apply the diff yourself.

------
nowarninglabel
Relevant discussion from 3 years ago on Slashdot:
[http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congre...](http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/03/06/1451216/congress-
mulls-api-for-congressional-data)

------
chaostheory
It's disappointing that this is only an idea, as opposed to a semi-working
prototype.

~~~
tonfa
There are already lots of people working on that kind of things, e.g.:
<http://www.opencongress.org/>

There was a barcamp not long ago: <http://transparencycamp.org/> with many
people from all over the world.

~~~
chaostheory
Yes but this post wasn't primarily about either one of those projects right?

~~~
tonfa
No, it is about a hypothetical project, while there are already lots of people
actually building stuff (and yes they do know about github and VCS).

------
arihersh
For anyone interested in this idea, check out legalhacks.org and join us for a
hackathon at UC Hastings on May 19, to mark up legislation and discuss
metadata standards for legislation. internationallegislation.eventbrite.com

Having legislative markup is necessary for any git-like system, because of the
complex ways that amendments are currently made.

We'll be joined at the hackathon by Grant Vergottini, a member of the LegalXML
OASIS committee, and the person who built the legislative editor that
California uses.

As many people here have commented, adoption by legislatures of

[seems my earlier comment does not appear]

------
lomegor
How do we start doing this? Is anyone willing to put some time to build this?
Of course this would be non-profit. Maybe if we get enough people interested,
we can start pressuring different organization to help us (Wikimedia comes to
mind).

There would be a need for people writing the laws into text and coders for
implementing different aspects. Maybe crowdfunded. I don't know, just throwing
ideas to see if anyone is interested.

We don't need the government to do this. We have the data (or most of it). We
need to start changing it from the outside.

------
lbrdn
We're missing the point I think. A site like this wouldn't be a way to combat
lobbyist. It would be a way for citizens to become the lobbyists. If a site
like this did pop up, it would eventually be dominated by a voice leaning a
certain way. So, this is not a one-site-fixes-all type deal. This format could
be a way for citizens to collaborate with other like-minded citizens and write
legislation of their own.

------
cpeterso
In 2007, New Zealand experimented with a public wiki to collect input for a
revision to the Policing Act laws. In 2008, the wiki would be reviewed by a
parliamentary committee. I'm not sure what the outcome was, but the wiki
itself is now offline.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7015024.stm>

------
cies
> It looks like there is an existing project > called Legal-RDF that was
> created to add > semantic data to digital legal documents, > but it’s XML
> and therefore not very readable.

RDF has several other formats besides XML (turtle being one of the more human
readable formats).

------
habeanf
I volunteer at the Public Knowledge Foundation (an Israeli version of The
Sunlight Foundation), we develop and maintain oknesset.org (like
opencongress.org). For the past couple months we've been researching the
possibility of representing Israeli law as a git repository, so that
oknesset.org can visualize the diff to a law a bill proposal represents, and
track it as a branch until it is merged into law. Since Israel is a relatively
young and small country the number of laws and changes is orders of magnitude
smaller than most western/democratic countries which publicize the legislative
process. Israel's legislative branch is unicameral so the process itself is
relatively straightforward; supposedly we'd be a good test case. We already
have quite a lot of insight but in general it seems that git (and generally,
any VCS) has significant impedance mismatch with the legislative process,
specifically regarding the ability to compile/link all the different laws into
one comprehensive database representing the law. One prominent example is the
existence of multiple timelines of ratification. There are at least three
dates relevant to the ratification of bills:

1\. Date of third (and final) vote = the date the parliament has voted a bill
as law

2\. Date of publication (for technical reasons this might not coincide with
the vote date)

3\. Date of validity - a bill is usually passed with a date of validity,
between the date of publication and validity the bill is not formally law yet.
Sometimes there are separate dates of validity for separate parts of the bill.
To make matters more complicated, dates of validity can be changed when the
bill designates government ministers with the authority to change them (the
dates).

Also, in Israel many laws never "make it" to their date of validity since the
yearly Law of Arrangements
(<http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/hesderim_eng.htm>) decides which laws
passed in the previous year have proper funding, such that officially some
laws get "punted" into the future, possibly indefinitely. It gets quite
confusing because from a legal point of view, the dates that are relevant to
the justice system (as in, when a bill is relevant or not to the court) are
usually the date of voting, whereas when it comes to government the third date
is the important one.

We are still moving forward with our initiative, but it seems that for now
there are no version control systems which are a good solution to the law
management problem.

(edited for formatting)

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unimpressive
This is actually on my to-do list for "Things I need to do if I ever get on a
state bar.".

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dlf
Having worked on actual legislative and regulatory amendments, this would be
useful simply for collating input of stakeholders. One example would be
regulatory comment periods.

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dgregd
Let's build a prototype. Kickstarter? I'm not from US but I'll donate. This is
so important for all democratic countries.

Then I'll vote for _any party_ which will deploy the git law system.

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DougBTX
For the UK, it makes me wonder how close you could get with the data here:
<http://www.legislation.gov.uk/>

~~~
objclxt
Not very (I maintain a nice iPhone app that front-ends the data on
legislation.gov.uk): the data on legislation.gov.uk is useful for Joe Public,
but when it comes to the actual practice of the law is woefully incomplete.
This is purely down to a lack of interest and funding on the Government's
part, as well as vested interests by people who publish law and charge for it.

There is _no free source_ of up-to-date UK law: many of the statute on
legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to date, and if you're looking
to practice this is obviously no good at all. This is in itself very sad. The
people who run legislation.gov.uk do a fantastic job, and hopefully access
will get much better in the future.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _many of the statute on legislation.gov.uk is not guaranteed to be up to
> date_ //

They say it's updated within 24h of publication. Which seems to be as up to
date as you'll get.

There are <http://services.parliament.uk/bills/> and
<http://bills.ais.co.uk/AC.asp> for tracking bills before publication (the
later one isn't working at the moment though).

So for example the 1st reading in the Lords of the Online Safety Bill was on
14th May and the text can be read at
[http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.htm...](http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/onlinesafety.html).

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DomKM
Please don't actually call this GitLaw. A better name conversion would be
LawHub since most lawyers have no idea what Git is.

~~~
Kiro
LawHub could be anything while GitLaw is exactly what it says: laws versioned
in git.

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agumonkey
Is this a recent trend in peoples mind ? Distributed versionning brings out
the need to understand laws I guess.

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skimmas
Why git? Why not a Wiki?

~~~
rurounijones
Git advantages are things better version management, branches, pulls etc

Having said that you can (and do) have Wikis that are backed by git.

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andrewcooke
so this is designed to cut the flow of blood to american liberty? i guess i
don't understand the imagery in the name?

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drstrangevibes
the documents themselves arent the problem, the real deception lies in the use
of language and words of art

~~~
fidotron
Exactly. My semi serious view is that laws should be written in Prolog.

~~~
philwelch
I, for one, would prefer not to be imprisoned due to a bug.

~~~
drstrangevibes
many people already are, though the bugs are lexical in nature

~~~
philwelch
The difference is that you can often get a judge to say "hey, that's a bug!"
and then you're released.

~~~
drstrangevibes
unfortunately many judges have "bugs" in them too!

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J3L2404
It's going to be extremely difficult to refactor.

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nerdfiles
We need github for music.

