Easily the best project I've seen over last coupler of days. Will definitely follow and may be contribute, if i can
All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
81–90 of 91 posts
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#82I 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 read once that the legal team at Github uses git commits in all their documents. Not sure where I read it. But it would be interesting to know more if it's true.
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's the case shouldn't it be much simpler today?
Alabama never updated parts of their constitution to remove it as they kept losing federal court cases. It just became unenforceable. For example their constitution still contains language for school segregation and removing voting rights for interracial marriages. Even when they did make updates. It was in the form of amendments which increase the overall length. Eg, the amendment that lets women vote.
As a foreigner, can you explain why to me? Wouldn’t politicians score easy (and good!) points by removing those parts?
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#84This is brilliant. Thank you for doing this. Where are you sourcing the original text from ?
https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india/co...
Pretty sure, I’ve seen it in plaintext as well on one of the government websites. I don’t remember where right now though.
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#85Is the official version in English? Are there authorised translations to other languages spoken in the sub continent?
Only ''authoritative'' translation into Hindi but not for any other language from English. See 58th amendment of 1987. You may find unofficial translations though.
http://legislative.gov.in/constitution-of-india
Here you go friend.
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alabama never updated parts of their constitution to remove it as they kept losing federal court cases. It just became unenforceable. For example their constitution still contains language for school segregation and removing voting rights for interracial marriages. Even when they did make updates. It was in the form of amendments which increase the overall length. Eg, the amendment that lets women vote.
As a foreigner, can you explain why to me? Wouldn’t politicians score easy (and good!) points by removing those parts?
Not in Alabama. There’s a reason the federal government had to use the national guard to force Alabama to follow Brown v Board of Education and let minorities attend the state college. This was in 1963, less than 60 years ago.
It’s not like the racist people in the state suddenly stopped being racist just because the federal Government force them to change their most egregious laws.
The latest election, however, the voters did approve to start the process to investigate removing racist language from their constitution.
>in a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" and stop the desegregation of schools, stood at the door of the auditorium to try to block the entry of two African American students: Vivian Malone and James Hood.[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_in_the_Schoolhouse_Doo...
> With more than 1.7 million votes cast, the amendment passed with 67% support. That means more than 585,000 people voted against it. The ballot didn’t mention race, and some voters might not have even known what the amendment involved.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/alabama-approves-bid-t...
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, that's not how it works. The 1st, 2nd, etc. Amendments are reinterpreted, but they are never done away with unless another amendment modifies or nullifies it. Laws that are not part of the constution on the other hand are nullified by the courts relatively frequently.
In theory, but in practice that is more of an accepted convention than a hard rule and dependent on the willingness of the other branches to rein it in. As the sole arbiter of what is and is not constitutional, including how to read and interpret existing language - they can do what they can get away with.
For instance, the text of the 10th Amendment makes it pretty clear that the original intent was that states were sovereign except for those powers explicitly carved out to the Federal gov't - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...]
Since WW2 (and a bit before that, including rulings 'reinterpreting' the commerce clause to cover things like growing wheat on your own land for your own consumption within an individual state to assist the Executive in enforcing price controls over the economy), the supreme court has ruled that essentially Congress can regulate anything it wants, city, state and federal level. This is how we've ended up with things like federal laws against possession of drugs (even in states that have them legalized), federal laws regulating firearms (including possession of ones that are legalized in the state), federal laws on computer crimes, etc.
If that isn't a radical shift and expansion of an amendment (without going through a further amendment process), I don't know what is.
Similarly on the defacto removal side - 4th amendment protections and Asset Forfeiture, which allows near arbitrary and impossible to stop seizure of 'suspicious' assets has been ruled constitutional on a very flimsy basis - essentially as long as it gets rubber stamped by the courts, good to go.
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#88I 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).
I wonder how difficult it would be to show the evolution of US jurisprudence via court ruling precedents.
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a foreigner, can you explain why to me? Wouldn’t politicians score easy (and good!) points by removing those parts?
Not in Alabama. There’s a reason the federal government had to use the national guard to force Alabama to follow Brown v Board of Education and let minorities attend the state college. This was in 1963, less than 60 years ago. It’s not like the racist people in the state suddenly stopped being racist just because the federal Government force them to change their most egregious laws. The latest election, however, the…
One more question, do you think it’s like this in every major white country or do you think US dropped the ball on this one? I’m curious about how Americans see the world. I won’t have any follow up comments, I promise.
Re: All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Direct democracy has its problems. 50.01% voting can cause serious issues. But using tech to improve speed of policy should be a thing
> But using tech to improve speed of policy should be a thing I’m going to push back against this. What problem are you actually solving that requires technology? Some would argue policy making should be purposefully slow and intentional to better understand the effects of said policy.
The cost of governance is enormous, there is no need to make it even more complex than it is.
There are plenty of places that have really benefited from adopting technology solutions to governance problems effectively. The transparency in processes and policy can really strengthen democracy. It is especially critical in developing economies who cannot afford non tech solutions
India itself for example has pretty robust electronic voting system for the last two decades, and is able to run it pretty securely and effectively. The cost of an election would vastlymore and be more difficult to administer without e-voting. Not mention the opportunity for localized corruption paper voting presents.
The ability to know proposed laws and regulations before and after they are passed, or ability to file your taxes easily all be of immense benefit any community.
This isn't to say that there no challenges with tech there are plenty, however the response should not be luddite and shun all of it in policy making.