French civil code now on GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#51

Post by arcatek » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:06 AM UTC

mpasternacki wrote: post #46

thomasbachem wrote: post #13

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 (…

It's the same thing in France, but that's why the OP repo is great: you can see the actual change as a usual diff (https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commit/0d5337622...).

I'm not sure how they do it, but I guess that it wouldn't be extremely hard to have a small grammar to automatically convert the legalese patch into an actual git patch (most of the time, the sentences which wrap the editions are the sames).

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#52

Post by gadders » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:07 AM UTC

In contrast, the list of Wales-only laws is (or used to be) maintained by one French woman at a Welsh university:

"But any queries may well be referred to Marie Navarro, the editor and chief researcher of Wales Legislation Online.

Like everyone in Wales, the judges use this website when they need to find out whether the law in Wales on a particular topic is different from English law.

The database is not run by the judiciary, by the Welsh Assembly Government or by one of the commercial publishers that pride themselves on keeping their subscribers up to date with English law.

It was set up in 1999 by Cardiff University Law School, and is run by Miss Navarro, a French lawyer who came to Wales on a European scholarship 13 years ago and decided to stay."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12674539

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#53

Post by nmc » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:07 AM UTC

mintplant wrote: post #33

nmc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native French speaker: very good translation. One small point: I do not understand why you added "it" to the last sentence of the introduction. Your translation of that particular sentence feels weird to me, why not simply: "And source code belongs in source control." Also, maybe "différentes" (in the third sentence) could have been translated to "various" ? * * * Aside, note that the original text itself has se…

One small point: I do not understand why you added "it" to the last sentence of the introduction. Your translation of that particular sentence feels weird to me, why not simply: "And source code belongs in source control." You're right, of course. That was left over when I switched from "it goes in" to "it belongs in". Fixed! For "les différentes assemblées" , would you say "various assembliess" or "the various assem…

In this context, I would definitely say "the various assemblies" since the author is obviously designating the various assemblies working on the Civil Code, not a random ensemble of assemblies.

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#54

Post by mackwic » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:09 AM UTC

gadders wrote: post #52

In contrast, the list of Wales-only laws is (or used to be) maintained by one French woman at a Welsh university: "But any queries may well be referred to Marie Navarro, the editor and chief researcher of Wales Legislation Online. Like everyone in Wales, the judges use this website when they need to find out whether the law in Wales on a particular topic is different from English law. The database is not run by the j…

That's a funny story. :)

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#55

Post by mdemare » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:11 AM UTC

ptaipale wrote: post #41

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?

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#56

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:12 AM UTC

arcatek wrote: post #51

mpasternacki wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

It's the same thing in France, but that's why the OP repo is great: you can see the actual change as a usual diff ( https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commit/0d5337622... ). I'm not sure how they do it, but I guess that it wouldn't be extremely hard to have a small grammar to automatically convert the legalese patch into an actual git patch (most of the time, the sentences which wrap the editions are the sam…

[deleted]

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#57

Post by danbruc » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:12 AM UTC

thomasbachem wrote: post #13

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 ;)

The first one I more or less randomly clicked on was of course »Verordnung über Qualitätsnormen für Bananen (QNormBanV)« [1], quality standards for bananas.

[1] https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/blob/master/q/qnormbanv...

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#58

Post by mackwic » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:14 AM UTC

ptaipale wrote: post #43

gtf21 wrote: post #10

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.

TL;DR: Denmark, Finland, Sweden and presumably others do it already. 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…

> I'm surprised if France and other supposedly civilized countries don't do it on behalf of the Justice Ministry or equivalent.

Please be kind in your comments.

Also, you're wrong (http://legifrance.gouv.fr/), but that's secondary relatively to the harsh tone you had there.

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#59

Post by bolaft » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:14 AM UTC

return0 wrote: post #39

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)

Did you take a look at the repo? It doesn't track new laws, it tracks the entire Code Civil and considers each new law a "commit", so it works perfectly. Here, as an example, the commit/law that legalizes same-sex marriage :

https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commit/b805ecf05...

You can clearly see that the "commit/law" changes the wordings of various files to replace "mother and father" by "parents" and "husband and wife" by "spouses".

Re: French civil code now on GitHub

#60

Post by seszett » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 10:19 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #8

kind of curious as to how this got generated in the first place

The full civil code text applicable for every date since at least 1817 is available at Legifrance.gouv.fr[1] so I suppose he just wrote a parser to transform each of these pages into plaintext, another one to get a list of all amendments, and commited each different version.

[1]http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do?cidTexte=LEGITEX...