Ask HN: Did anyone ever create GitLaw?

[robertn702]

A thread from 11 years ago[0] proposed a "A GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents". Did anyone ever develop something similar to this? Even without the ability to propose changes, being able to view a git history of passed bills would be useful for anyone who would want to analyze the changes over time.

If a tool has been built, please share it. If not, what are the major blockers to at least building the history / diff tool?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3967921

[jonahbenton]

Some jurisdictions do this

https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201...

There are various markup language experiments

https://docs.openlaw.io/

https://legalschema.org/docs/

https://law.mit.edu/pub/draftingx2rl/release/2

[jruohonen]

A good thing that such a thing has already been proposed.

For the lawmaking I follow, many of the systems in use tend to share some rudimentary ideas of version control, but they are all awfully bad at this job. I suppose the problem is that amendments and related important things are often done in closed-door cabinets; hence, it is often difficult if not impossible to determine (without leaks) who amended what and why (and/or was lobbied to do so). This issue is something I've long considered to be problematic for democracy, but politicians have their own reasons to disagree.

[westurner]

Various localities upload their statutes to a git repository hosted as a GitHub project; but I'm not aware of any using Pull Request (PR) workflows to propose or debate legislative bills (or to enter or link to case law precedent for review).

The US Library of Congress operates the THOMAS system for legislative bills. How could THOMAS be improved; in order to support evidence-based policy; in order to improve democracy in democratic republics like the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THOMAS

How do state systems for legislative bills document workflows and beyond compare to THOMAS, the US federal Congress system? Why do we need 50+1 independent [open source?] software applications; could states work together on such essential systems?

IIRC, LOC invested in improving THOMAS with: markup language to typographically-readable HTML support?

It may be helpful to send an email to your state with the regex regular expression pattern necessary to make online statute section and subsection references a href links instead of non-clickable string. TIL the section sign ("§") is older than the hyperlink; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_sign

Parliamentary informatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_informatics

FWIU, diffing documents is a solved problem.

How could pull request workflows be improved in order to support legislative and post-legislative workflows (like controlling for whether a funded plan actually has the proscribed impact)?

High School and College Policy debate (CX; Cross Examination debate) enjoy equal rights to 'fiat'. IRL, we must control for whether the plan and funding have the predicted impact.

E.g. GitHub and GitLab have various features that could support legislative workflows: code owners, multiple approvals required to merge, emoji reactions on Issues and Pull Requests and comments therein such that you don't have to say why you voted a particular way, GPG-signatures required for commit and merge, 2FA.

FWIU, the Aragorn / district0x projects have some of the first DLT-based (Blockchain) systems for democracy; all of the rest of us trust one party to share root access and multi-site backup responsibilities and have insufficient DDOS protections.

[turtleyacht → westurner]

There was a discussion on HN where the real blocker is everyone uses Microsoft Word, and all the related tools on it, and no one was going to change their workflow.

Any such legislative solution may involve meeting the users where they are, first. Understanding the whole lifecycle, so to speak.

[50]

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/version-story