This is a problem for many of the municipalities in the United States. I'm not familiar with the history of how this ended up happening for Georgia, but for municipalities the cause is often the economics of codifying and publishing the official code.
Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary. Governments often outsource the work to a third party vendor in order to free up internal human and monetary resources. The end effect is that the codifier controls the code.
There are all kinds of downstream effects. For one, computer-readable formats of the law are nonexistent. This also means that there is a huge barrier to creating interesting new technologies on top of the law.
I'm the cofounder at Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org), a non-profit that is trying to fix this problem by introducing technology at all stages of the law making process. We're working with Washington D.C. right now, and you can find a glimpse into the future at https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ (bulk downloads available at the link at the bottom).
Assembling the laws into a usable code is extremely labor intensive. Someone has to figure out where the new law fits into the old code and copy and paste as necessary. Governments often outsource the work to a third party vendor in order to free up internal human and monetary resources. The end effect is that the codifier controls the code.
There are all kinds of downstream effects. For one, computer-readable formats of the law are nonexistent. This also means that there is a huge barrier to creating interesting new technologies on top of the law.
I'm the cofounder at Open Law Library (http://www.openlawlib.org), a non-profit that is trying to fix this problem by introducing technology at all stages of the law making process. We're working with Washington D.C. right now, and you can find a glimpse into the future at https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/ (bulk downloads available at the link at the bottom).