Show HN: International Legal Dictionary

This is an international legal dictionary, an experiment in improving the situation: glossaries are scraped and parses from official sources: https://github.com/public-law/open-gov-crawlers. The results are saved as datasets in well formed JSON with Dublin Core metadata: https://github.com/public-law/datasets

I add Library of Congress subject headings to the sources, to enable filtering (still to come).

The web app is basically an old-school mashup, which I've always liked.

Another experiment is using the Dale-Chall readability formula to improve the reader's experience. Here's an example of it at work:

https://www.public.law/dictionary/entries/amicus-curiae

This is an experiment, using readability as a relative metric. I.e., not extracing an absolute grade-level score as its normaly used. Instead, using it to compare different definitions of the same phrase. My theory is, there's strong scientific validity for this use, even when applied to very short passages: All I simply want is to figure out, "Which is more readable? Passage A or B?" And then, my code sorts the definitions in order of readability to (theoretically) produce a newspaper-article-like effect: A reader can read the first couple of sentences to get an overview of the story.

Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
public.law

That said, you might like, say, the New South Wales (Australian) guide to legal terms and self help:

https://www.lawaccess.nsw.gov.au/Pages/representing/lawassis...

which is government funded and assists in connecting people with legal aid and translating legal terms to plainspeak.

Best wishes with your endeavour.

The sorting is quite a bit of fun to see in action.

But, what advantage is there that the source is from a government resource? Versus, say, doing a Google search, or browsing Merriam-Webster's legal dictionary, or doing a search through Black's online edition, and so on.

First, they're public-domain, or should be! In reality, there's crown copyright in the commonwealth countries. And every US State is its own fiefdom often with arcane publishing deals that keep the laws out of the public domain (or so they claim). In the US, only federally authored works are clearly public domain by statute. I got tangentially involved in the issue when I was in law school when I made my first app for Oregon: https://boingboing.net/2009/10/30/oregon-once-again-cl.html

Second, my thinking goes like this: For most people, interactions with their local government is a big part of the legal process. And so knowing how the government defines words is extremely important. IMO it's very persuasive to use the govt's own text in one's arguments. Some of the dictionary's definitions are from actual statutes, and so have the force of law. E.g. https://www.public.law/dictionary/sources/world.public.law__...

Black's is a fantastic book, and I'm a big fan of its editor, Bryan Garner. But as far legal arguments go, it's merely a somewhat persuasive "secondary source."

Ok, and finally, by me picking the sources, I'm filtering out tons of unattributed crap that's online.

We can blame the Roman's and, in no small part, William Garrow for all that ..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Garrow

Despite concepts in common there can still remain the complaint of Shaw (and later Wilde) that we are divided by a common language.

Readability is good, at some point in any legal procedure though there comes an importance of being precise about nomenclature.

In the field of mathematics, for example, such phrases as "if and only if" and "neccesary and sufficient" go deeper than casual reading might understand.

Now comes the twist in law that common phrases may have different interpretations between countries, or as may the case in the USofA, between different counties or states.

Still any move to increase understanding of the law in general with pointers to the law in specific locations is a good one.