Do people have tools that help with this now? If not, sounds like a project that groups like sunlight foundation would fund.
But I agree, it seems pretty hard and would involve being able to properly identify which sections are to be amended (there's a lot of navigational references like "paragraph", "subsection", "subparagraph" and how to apply the verbs I can see: "adding", "striking", "inserting", and I'm not sure how precise the existing documentation is in its references.
I'm a lawyer by training, although I no longer practice law, and what I'll say is that when you read enough of these you get pretty good at piecing it together provided that you have some grounding in the existing law (since it's very heavy on amending language). This problem has been on my list for a long time, I've just never had enough time to think it all through. It's probably more approachable now versus 5-10 years ago given the advances in NLP, which at least in my mind, was the barrier on getting started.
The navigational references are not always consistent. They're human-readable, but not really marked up for straight machine processing. Given that you'd probably never get the Federal government to move toward some kind of standard markup, I think any solution would be AI-driven (not to overuse the buzzword, but I think it fits).
One day I'll get started on this. I have no idea how it could make any money, but I've been interested in it since law school.
I'm hesitant to ask who else wants to work on this, because by this evening, this will be back in the category of things I don't have time to look at.
