41–50 of 126 posts
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).
One thing that is not mentioned though : will it autoupdate? And if yes, at which rate?
This would be a great idea in general for the legislature of any country, to be able to see exactly how and when the law was changed would be valuable for transparency and also research. Commit messages could reference transcripts of the debates surrounding changes.
I'm surprised if France and other supposedly civilized countries don't do it on behalf of the Justice Ministry or equivalent. I mean, the fundamental responsibility of citizens is to adhere to the law (ignorantia juris non excusat); the fundamental responsibility of government is to make the law available to citizens because it is not reasonable to require compliance with laws that are not practically available to citizens.
I'm in Finland, and the full content of law books has been in internet for almost 20 years, published first by the state-owned publishing house that gave out the print versions, and more recently by Ministry of Justice who has contracted the technical execution out. The database structure managing pieces of legislation dates back to 1980's, but until 1990's it was available only through a license payment.
Individual laws (and executive orders, state treaties and such) that are published by parliament or ministries have of course always been public information and published in the net since 1990's; the important thing is actually maintenance of "up-to-date" version because the parliament publishes its laws mostly as "patches" (i.e. only a changed section is reviewed, voted on, and published).
The database cross-links to published parliamentary process so that the official background work for each law, section and paragraph is available, including preparatory statements by parliamentary committees, any dissenting opinions and so on.
Also more significant precedent cases from high courts are available in database. (We have a so-called Roman law system where the code is primary source of law, unlike American/English common law where precedents are more important; nevertheless neither system is absolute of course, and precedents do matter in civil law systems as well.)
The database descriptions can be found:
Denmark: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_dk/index_en.htm
Finland: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_fi/index_en.htm
France: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_de/index_en.htm
Germany: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_de/index_en.htm
Sweden: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_sv/index_en.htm
Couldn't this have been done without taking gay marriage as the first example? Or does IT always need to go hand in hand with unconditional progressism?
kind of curious as to how this got generated in the first place
Unfortunately, the author was utterly careless about spelling. That really makes it feel like a quick hack.
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 ;)
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 (already heavily "patched"), like "In the section II, item 13a, change words 'foo and bar' to 'foo, baz and quux'". This mess untangled into an actual, highlighted, unified text is an actual product, and lawyers happily pay the subscription. I imagine it is similar in other countries.
I need to keep in practice with my French, so I've translated the README below. Let me know if I got anything wrong. ------ The French Civil Code, in Git Introduction Here is a little hack, the result of an afternoon of code: the Civil Code in Git. If one considers the law as a set of texts modified by the various assemblies of the state, one can consider them as a set of text files created collaboratively. The membe…
I already made something similar (but more user-friendly) a few years ago using Django: https://criminocorpus.org/fr/legislation/civil/ . And there are similar diff possibilities: https://criminocorpus.org/fr/legislation/versions/689/1/diff... :)
Generated PDF are not really web 2.0 :/
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).
Legal documents are particularly bad to place under source control, because most of them already reference the previous code they are replacing. And, since the code is basically readonly what's the point of using github? I think legal documents do need a versioning system, but it would have to take into account the peculiarities of the domain (i.e. have each article as a node and amendments as graph links)