71–80 of 244 posts
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We actually have something similar in germany, called the "Bundesgit" ( https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze )
I'm not a native German speaker but that's a pretty clever pun, right?
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The funny thing is that a lot of law is structured like definitions, the actual law, then consequences. Any of those three can change independently, and change the meaning of the law. So diffs are often not as useful as you wish.
We need to parse the law into some simulation code, and then have unit tests (does scenario B cause citizen A's rights to be violated), and then check if changes break the tests.
XML? this should be in json!
Given the level of detail in the XML, I shudder to think what monstrosity that would create. Heck they didn't even bother to include a way to inherit styles, they are just included in every case.
Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.
Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.
Interpretation isn't an unguided, irrational process. When your lawyer answers "it depends" its because you've placed him at one point in what's really a decision tree and asked him: "where does it end?" It's like asking a programmer whether a particular token in a C++ program is a type name or an identifier. It depends. If you imagine the universe of human activity as a multi-dimensional space, you can think of laws…
I'm really tempted to collect the XML files and put them on github, with periodic checkpoints to update it with the latest. Watching the evolution of law over time is a fascinating thing and using SW engineering tools to help would be really fun.
This is currently done via scraping: https://github.com/divegeek/uscode The diffs are huge.
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I was under the impression law is essentially "append only". New laws override existing laws, but the text of the existing law never changes.
Laws are essentially diffs against the US code. The diff (slip law) is canonical. They are continually compiled into the US code, which can involve deleting or changing text just like a diff, and periodically an edited, annotated code is published. After a certain amount of time, Congress enacts a portion of the published code, making it canonical and overriding any prior slip law. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U…