Show HN: how I built the largest open database of Australian law

Well done!

I think in the law related subjects there is a huge potential for digitalisation. In Germany the law texts are online but the paragraphs not linked

no, there's a lot that we need before we can even begin to improve this

even with a database of current laws as they exist right now, the laws to change them primarily come in 2 forms:

1. verbatim additional laws

2. instructions that are essentially diffs to the current law. what words to change, strike out, sections to re-arrange and modify, as well as new lines of code. these have to be spliced in to the prior state of the law

and after we have all that, laws are often following different logic. like logic gates. One set of laws may be using "and" as a set of conditions that must be satisfied all as one, but it also could be using "and" and an "exclusive or", a set of conditions where only one has to be satisfied. but when writing it, those things all flowed grammatically and harmonization of laws wasn't prioritized.

there's a whole lot that can be improved that we don't have the infrastructure to do just yet. someone could do it, but that's the first step.

PRO is a prominent player in the space.

https://public.resource.org/

Notably, it’s thanks to them that in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled Georgia’s legal code, including annotations, is uncopyrightable.

Australia has had free, searchable collections of Australian Law for 25+ years. Austlii is a prime example. There are Federal and State collections as well. The author is conscientious enough to read the scraping policy (or was blocked by anti-scraping tools) from feeding from one of these sites into his LLM.