71–80 of 91 posts
I always love these sort of things. Here's the same for the US constitution: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution As a bonus, this one attempted to backdate the commits in a cyphered way (git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970).
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A constitution is the high level document that your citizens agree are the foundational principles governing the state. They are a set of general points that nearly everyone can understand at that level and agree to. They are not the minutiae and laws that govern in detail. 104 is too many principles, or at the wrong level of detail, to be at the level of a constitution for people to discuss in concept and agree to a…
Not all countries are the same as the USA
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A constitution is the high level document that your citizens agree are the foundational principles governing the state. They are a set of general points that nearly everyone can understand at that level and agree to. They are not the minutiae and laws that govern in detail. 104 is too many principles, or at the wrong level of detail, to be at the level of a constitution for people to discuss in concept and agree to a…
As time passes, new things come, new challenges. For example, computer fraud, health practices, research, nuclear weapons. Each of the new law passed to address any of something like this, is known as amendment. At the same time, any changes are also known as amendments.
Is there something like this for the entire US Code? Laws in the US are often written to say something like "Amend Section X to say Y.", and it's very hard to follow.
You then also need to work out the ramifications of the change. Eg if motion 39 amend section y to x - Therefore 9.3(iii) is removed and renumber section 9.3, these are the Consequentials and should also be included.
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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…
If it's the case shouldn't it be much simpler today?
Quebec did/does the same thing, except they're unreasonably successful at it: they lost the war with the British, yet have controlled the choice of Canadian PM for decades.
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There is no judicial review for amendments to the US constitution either. In the US the job of the courts are to interpret and apply the constitution. It's not their role to write it or constrain the writing of it.
The Supreme Court can and does severely constrain or expand what the writing is interpreted to actually apply to - you see this all the time around 1st, 2nd, 5th, 10th US amendments. In theory, a whole amendment could be neutered or nuked that way.
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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…
For example, here is a collection of "Statement of changes in Immigration Rules: 1994 to 2020": https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-rules-...
If you click on the latest document, "accessible" version, you'll find paragraphs such as the following:
Changes to the Introduction
Intro1. In paragraph 6.2, after the definition of “English language course”, insert:
“ “EU national” in Appendix T5 (Temporary Worker) International
Agreement Worker means a person who is a national of: Austria, Belgium,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia,
Slovenia, Spain, or Sweden; and who is not also a British citizen.”.
Changes to Part 7
7.1. For the second paragraph 276BB1(vi)(d), substitute:
“(e) the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the
Department for International Development or the Foreign, Commonwealth
and Development Office has determined should qualify for relocation under
the ex-gratia redundancy / resignation package, including confirmation that
they served ‘on frontline duties outside the wire in Helmand’.”.
There are other complications, which I can't recall, but I dearly wish someone would do this for UK law.
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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…
This is my (basic, lay) understanding of how changes to UK law happen, as well. For example, here is a collection of "Statement of changes in Immigration Rules: 1994 to 2020": https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-rules-... If you click on the latest document, "accessible" version, you'll find paragraphs such as the following: Changes to the Introduction Intro1. In paragraph 6.2, after the definition…
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.
There was a lot of media noise about this bill, and it was frustratingly difficult to figure out what it actually did.