31–40 of 91 posts
India's constitution is the largest national constitution in the world, and second-largest overall, only behind Alabama's, which has a whopping 951 amendments and nearly 400,000 words as of January 2021.
I look forward to the day when constitutional amendments are pull requests.
Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version control. One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc in most legal documents.
I think software engineers- thanks to much faster iteration cycles and having clarity and order as their only concern- have developed solutions and practices that absolutely can and should be applied also to the management of the law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version control. One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc in most legal documents.
In Italy (and I guess in many other places) laws are effectively commits , not documents/ files. The actual law is often implicit in the result of the successive modifications each new law applies to the existing ones. Which is terrible from a usability perspective- it's like working with lists of patches instead of files. I think software engineers- thanks to much faster iteration cycles and having clarity and order…
My understanding is that there are always administrative departments responsible for updating and publishing the statutes based on the bills that have been passed. This is effectively applying a patch approved by the legislative process to the repository of statutes.
If you try to dig into a mainstream news story about legislative actions to the actual bill text you'll quickly find that for all but the simplest actions the bill text is useless for understanding the effect of the bill. The problem is that you need the surrounding context of the statute or regulation that is being amended in order to understand. At least for my state and the US federal legislative systems, the web based UI for understanding all this is abysmal.
The cynic in me thinks that legislators don't even understand the true nature of their own legislation. They are making voting decisions based on staff summaries, verbal discussions, media reports, constituent sentiment analysis, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version control. One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc in most legal documents.
If diff is not enough, you have wdiff. :)
India's constitution is the largest national constitution in the world, and second-largest overall, only behind Alabama's, which has a whopping 951 amendments and nearly 400,000 words as of January 2021.
Who would’ve thought that Alabama would be home to Big Gov.
> At the beginning of the 20th century, the President of the Alabama Constitutional Convention, John B. Knox,[12] stated in his inaugural address that the intention of the convention was "to establish white supremacy in this State", "within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution"[7]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Alabama#Raci...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would’ve thought that Alabama would be home to Big Gov.
It’s because it was written to oppress minorities in as many ways as possible. > At the beginning of the 20th century, the President of the Alabama Constitutional Convention, John B. Knox,[12] stated in his inaugural address that the intention of the convention was "to establish white supremacy in this State", "within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution"[7] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_A…