> Understanding law is an expertise, not a casual hobby.
Wow. This is patently offensive. My responsibility as a citizen is to understand the law and comply with it. In fact, that's the only responsibility I have as a citizen. That's what it means to be civil. To be civilized. To live under a body of laws. If you don't understand them, you can't follow them ... how can you call yourself civilized?
If our laws are so complex that they can't be grasped by any layman, then we have two choices.
1. Eliminate the laws and render the system simple enough to grasp.
2. Create tools that allow us to grasp them.
Now, I prefer #1, but willing to settle for #2. You seem to reject both?
Anyway, this is the beginning of an open-source system that's already available in proprietary form in some fashion. If you think lawyers understand the law, well, you're a bit naive. They just use LexisNexis. Which provides laws, cases, rulings, opinions, etc. etc.
> you won't take into account Supreme Court rulings that will affect the interpretation
Please read some of the other comments. The author gets this. And this is just Version 1.0, right? That's like saying a baby is useless because it can't hold on to a job. Well, yeah. If you kill the baby, it never will.
> You are supposed to try and meet your representative. You are supposed to talk to her, and listen to her, not as a politician, but as a person you are entrusting with an important job.
This is very quaint, and honestly, I'm a big fan of the principles on which this nation was founded ... but this is merely one of those principles.
Why do you think that the founding document of our laws, the Constitution, enshrines the postal service? The postal service was then, what the internet is now. The founding fathers also recognized the power of shedding light on the legislative process.
> Now, I prefer #1, but willing to settle for #2. You seem to reject both?
I completely embrace 2, as you do. I just don't think that live tracking of legislation is the way to do it, and I think that it has dangerous pitfalls.
> If you think lawyers understand the law, well, you're a bit naive.
I think they understand the principles on which the law is grounded. Basically, either law school is useful or it isn't. By most accounts, law school is 3 years of intense study, at the end of which you're qualified to...use LexisNexis. Either those 3 years are a waste, or they learn something that takes roughly that long to learn.
Of course some laymen can achieve that knowledge, and some in less than 3 years, much like people can learn to be good programmers without setting foot in a classroom. But that's an exception, and we can't predicate the functioning of society on exceptions.
> That's like saying a baby is useless because it can't hold on to a job. Well, yeah. If you kill the baby, it never will.
That's a fair point. And part of the beauty of the baby is that you don't know what it will grow up to do. But every parent has a dream for their child; my argument is that the dream expressed is misguided.
> This is very quaint, and honestly, I'm a big fan of the principles on which this nation was founded ... but this is merely one of those principles.
I know, it is quaint. But I don't really see a good alternative, because I don't trust our ability (yes, mine included) to figure out who to trust based on crafted messages, or selected video clips.
As I said, your point about the baby is well taken. This can definitely be a building block—but why don't we think about a building block to what?
As a thought, how about running analyses on laws vs. desired outcomes vs. predicated outcomes. Analyses run using open-source code—and hopefully eventually with predictive power. I think something like that might be very useful, and would definitely rely on this repository; especially if someone has the resources and time to artificially create it going back several decades.
Wow. This is patently offensive. My responsibility as a citizen is to understand the law and comply with it. In fact, that's the only responsibility I have as a citizen. That's what it means to be civil. To be civilized. To live under a body of laws. If you don't understand them, you can't follow them ... how can you call yourself civilized?
If our laws are so complex that they can't be grasped by any layman, then we have two choices.
1. Eliminate the laws and render the system simple enough to grasp.
2. Create tools that allow us to grasp them.
Now, I prefer #1, but willing to settle for #2. You seem to reject both?
Anyway, this is the beginning of an open-source system that's already available in proprietary form in some fashion. If you think lawyers understand the law, well, you're a bit naive. They just use LexisNexis. Which provides laws, cases, rulings, opinions, etc. etc.
> you won't take into account Supreme Court rulings that will affect the interpretation
Please read some of the other comments. The author gets this. And this is just Version 1.0, right? That's like saying a baby is useless because it can't hold on to a job. Well, yeah. If you kill the baby, it never will.
> You are supposed to try and meet your representative. You are supposed to talk to her, and listen to her, not as a politician, but as a person you are entrusting with an important job.
This is very quaint, and honestly, I'm a big fan of the principles on which this nation was founded ... but this is merely one of those principles.
Why do you think that the founding document of our laws, the Constitution, enshrines the postal service? The postal service was then, what the internet is now. The founding fathers also recognized the power of shedding light on the legislative process.
Tools like this help that.