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Spanish legislation as a Git repo

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Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#81

Post by bertil »

comboy wrote: post #66

Add CI to check if new laws don't contradict with any existing ones.

You might need to turn laws into formal proofs, and the existence of judges makes me think that’s not as likely as you would like. A commenting system would though—trained on countries’s precedents, jurisprudence and traditions might.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#83

Post by Mordisquitos »

enriquelop wrote: post #2

I built a pipeline that converts all Spanish state legislation into version-controlled Markdown. Each law is a file, each reform is a real git commit with the historical date. 8,642 laws, 27,866 commits. The idea: legislation is just patches on patches on patches. Git already solves this. Instead of reading "strike paragraph 3 and replace with...", you get an actual diff. The repo is the product. Browse any law, git…

Congratulations, this is a brilliant resource. You have done one of those countless things which I often think about doing, but my utter lack of follow-through and other distractions make it a fantasy. I cannot wait to clone the repo and explore it.

As to what can be done with the data, maybe one interesting step could be a graph-database regarding laws which reference other laws or the definitions that they depend on?

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#89

Post by 1718627440 »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #37

I think this is great. Only limit of git is I can't imagine "git blame" works. It would be nice to know who voted for and against each patch. Git isn't structured for collaborative commits.

You could have the parliament (meaning including the election cycle) as the main author and then the parties and votes as Co-Authors.

Re: Spanish legislation as a Git repo

#90

Post by DennisP »

Schmerika wrote: post #14
j-bos wrote: post #4

This is brilliant. I wish this were available for all legislations. There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.

> There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks. There really, really are. The legal industry is well aware of that fact - and how many billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more efficient and understandable. You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying' Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and complicated [0]? Well, lawyers…

It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to front because the back was where they put all the graft. An example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a congressman's birthday party.

For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.

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