this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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I have a temporary dream (as in we'll see how long this lasts...) of building a database of legislation by state that can easily be queried.
I think a lot of people rely on the news to tell them how to interpret legislation when it's actually really easy to figure it out for yourself if you know where to look. And with the proliferation of AI, it should be even easier to know what legislation is without some political analyst with an agenda.
Anyway, the idea is to have all this available on one website that uses open source code for the underlying database.
That would be a great project indeed... just a heads up:
I was part of a group exploring to do something similar a couple decades ago. The main problem we found, was dealing with those first two points: by the time we figured out all the places a single "state" (this wasn't in the US) stored all their legislation, they had already changed some of them. We realized that it would take either: collaboration from the government in terms of standardizing how they store things... or a constant game of chasing around the changes they made. At the time, we concluded it wasn't practical to do it for free, and indeed some paid services have emerged offering something similar, but they're not open.
My suggestion: if you managed to find a way for governments to make legislation accessible in a standardized way, that would be a HUGE success. Ideally, have it written into constitution, and/or use the constitution to beat government bodies into compliance.
Also a warning: the messy state of things, seems to be a sort of "job security" for some lawyer firms and companies offering the consolidation services, so taking that away may not be easy.
...that's freakin' cool!
This could really be an amazing project! I’ll see what I can do!
I've also wondered if it's possible to somehow hook git into legislation. To track changes like how laws are amended and superseded and so on.
Law has a lot in common with software and is constantly being improved by a large number of people.
Added to the list ! That’s such a clever way of tracking law history !
Yeah, but different people interpret legislation differently, and the gramatically literal interpretation isn't always the "right" one. So it would be smart to also include links to any cases or precedents based on them.