111–120 of 126 posts
Finalement, le Code Civil, c'est une partie du code source de la France. Et le code source, ca va sur un source control. Point. Which means - correct me if I'm wrong: "The civil code is like a part of the source code of France. And then, it should be in a source control."
I just woke up and wow. Well, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have of course.
What does this offer on top of Legifrance? http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_fr/index_en.htm (I don't know any French and don't know the particulars of French legal system that much, so I cannot really assess quickly based on what I can find in the net).
Isn't that obvious? Pull Requests! Can you imagine a democracy editing its laws through pull requests and code review?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Norwegian laws: https://lovdata.no/info/information_in_english It's a financially independent (it has a "pro" version) non-profit owned by the department of justice and the faculty of law of the University of Oslo. It is an official source and as such laws published there are officially, legally published and it has been that way since 2001. Laws relevant to private citizens are available for free. It's pretty ne…
FWIW french law is also available officially via http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr though that's not exactly sexy. All of the french code (and other sections of french laws) are available for free with full history e.g. http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=...
This looks like a demo day project of Le Wagon, a french bootcamp in Paris (I found a link from their demo day https://youtu.be/hHPOV8vz5Q8?t=503 ).
Where you part of that bootcamp too ? (It seems to reuse the same "Nul n'est cense ignorer la loi." gimmick!)
All German federal laws and regulations are here: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze I do especially like the GitHub avatar: https://avatars1.githubusercontent.com/u/1994383 ;)
Is this account actually maintained by Bundestag (or other actual piece of state administration), or is it just a mirror? Also, either German law is really mature and stable, or this repository is unmaintained: last commit oin master is Jan 2013. I'd love to see such a repository for the acts in my country, by the way, but the official source is a PDF, and most of the published acts are actually patches to existing (…
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From their README, it's just someone that converted the XML version published by the "Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz" (Ministry of Justice and for Customer Protection) which as they note is available at http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/
For instance, a section I've used often for running my business is the VAT part: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/index.html There is a notification service, including an RSS feed: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/aktuDienst.html
About the Markdown version in GitHub: after a quick inspection, most diffs seem to be plain additions of content, presumably as it was converted to Markdown. However, some diffs might have tracked changes in the laws, as this one: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/commit/3c1bada22f08b4e0...
I suspect the author ran the converter a few times and then abandoned it. In principle, it should be possible to keep updating it.
The improvement over the official XML version seems to be that with Markdown it's easier to get understandable diffs.
This github repo seems to treat the French legal code as a flat text file. Which is useful, but I'm guessing doesn't do a good job of capturing structural changes to the legal code. Is this fair? So I'm curious: how do legal scholars and practising lawyers track changes to legal systems over time? Do they use trees, DAGs, or something else? Do they have concepts similar to change dependencies and regressions? What sp…
The answer to your question about how lawyers figure out changes to the law is: they give an assignment to a new associate (or law student, in the case of scholars) to track down the history manually. It's a horrible pain in the ass.
Most codifications I'm familiar with (both state and Federal), whether in print or online, include a list of amendments along with each statute. But any given amendment may have changed a dozen (or far more) statutes, and it's generally a tedious and time consuming job to track down the changes to a given statute over time. Also, the reasoning for the changes, when it's given at all, is often burried in committee reports, which are rarely accessible by following links on a webpage. Some commercial services (LEXIS, WestLaw) will provide historical "snapshots" of particularly important statutes (the Internal Revenue Code, for example), which can help to some degree but which still leave a lot to be desired.
Statutes in general contain a lot of structural information (cross-references, definitions, etc.) which in some online sources are hyperlinked at least, but changes to which are not to my knowledge expressly tracked. One can easily get confused when, for example, a court case refers to a section of a statute that has been renumbered, or to which a new subsection has been inserted in the middle.
I took a quick look at the UK site above, and ... it actually looks quite impressive. As you say, however, it doesn't purport to be current, so some legwork is still left to the grunts. As a former programmer (and text munger a la Perl), it has always seemed to me that there should be a lot of opportunities to apply the tools of software development (version control in particular) to the texts of the law, but simply slurping up text into a repository is not likely to be all that helpful, and the overhead of doing anything useful would be considerable.