http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/
All laws are available in XML, HTML, PDF, etc. The site also provides an RSS feed.
In addition, some enthusiasts regularily download stuff from there and apply those to a Git repository:
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze
That way, this repository contains not only the current laws, but also the history of how the laws developed!
For the Git repository, the XML version is not used directly, but converted to markdown. This produces very readable diffs:
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/commit/f90e8fc8eb20f081...
Wouldn't it be cool if we could finally manage our laws of filing pull requests?
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats/
XML, HTML, RDF/XML for everything, as well as browsable online (often with original source PDFs of the printed laws), with both online and RDF/XML representations showing all alterations to the law (with date, cross-reference to the Act that made the amendment, etc.).
The website is one of the big success stories of RDF, IMO, as it is all based around a model of the laws in RDF, with everything else just being varying serializations thereof. It also allows the website to show what has been amended — no need for dumping stuff to GitHub and then diffing it! (e.g., see the annotation on 28(1)c in http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/part/IV)
That all said, there tends to be a delay between the PDF being uploaded and everything being marked up and entered into the RDF database (see the "new legislation" on the home page).
Here's the post if interested.
Watching the evolution of law over time is a fascinating thing and using SW engineering tools to help would be really fun.
https://github.com/divegeek/uscode
The diffs are huge.
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/commit/f90e8fc8eb20f081...
(see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137337)
I'd be surprised if we couldn't write a parser for bills to produce more efficient diffs.
I'd love to `git blame` the U.S. code.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code#Legal_status
"When sections are repealed, their text is deleted and replaced by a note summarizing what used to be there." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code#Treatment_o...
I'd do it myself but I'm already neck deep in work and volunteer projects outside of work.
There is a link to the schema used and a stylesheet (I assume for the xhmtl maybe?) that I would like to add in. But one step at a time.
In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.
No, this is usually "lack of sufficient facts to answer question".
If a crime has 4 elements, and you've said you've committed 3 and maybe the 4th depending on how you look at it, the answer to the question "can i be convicted" is "it depends", because it depends on the argument about the 4th element.
If your followup is to claim that there should never be questions about whether you've achieved some element of a crime, it should be binary, that's simply impossible.
Crimes, for example, are often about intent and causation. Until science provides us with historical mind reading devices, and completely accurate point-in-time reconstruction of the world, we're going to have to rely on various theories and evidence (much like science relies on theories and evidence).
Even point-in-time reconstruction wouldn't solve all causation issues, because the issue is often a fairness one: Is it fair to hold the defendant liable for a crime X steps removed from his own action.
Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity.
Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field. We can do a lot of things to simply make essential complexity go away while we bicker amongst ourselves about accidental complexity.
Law can't do that. Law must treat all cases, all combinations, as they arise. Every single day a configuration of people, motives and circumstances emerges that has never before emerged, could not have been foreseen and which may never occur again. The law must still apply.
Law is hard because the problem domain is everything humans do.
Let me know how many story points you think that scope is worth.
True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.
If you imagine the universe of human activity as a multi-dimensional space, you can think of laws as carving out subspaces with lines (that may be more or less fuzzy) and attaching significance to particular subspaces. If I ask: "my x coordinate is 5, where am I?" what do you answer?
One quote that sticks in my mind is this one from P.J. O'Rourke in Parliament of Whores, concerning Ken Starr's written position on a flag-desecration law:
Congress had "acted narrowly." (That is, the law is very specific, and you
can't be arrested for having a smart look on your face near the flag or
anything like that—which is good because being specific is the essence of
lawmaking and the whole difference between having a congress and having a
mom.)
The point here is that specificity is good so that J. Random Citizen can easily know if they are breaking the law or not.But this is the reason that we have the ability to have the law interpreted on a case-by-case basis, which is different from interpreting "laws", the specific as-written instances. Note that the Supreme court doesn't hear or decide on a law randomly, only when someone brings a specific case to them.
The law should be written as "it's a crime to kill someone" (although, that may be too specific, and a more appropriate wording may be "it's a crime to rob someone of their life and livelihood"), and it's up to the executive and judicial branches to decide (or aid in deciding in the case of the executive) what the punishment should be. This is the defendant's "day in court", as it were.
I think too many people do treat the law as absolute in wording, rather than absolute in spirit. A law that enforces something unjustly on the defendant is just as bad as a law that doesn't justly enforce the plaintiff's rights. Finding that appropriate middle ground is the basis for the grey area that is the interpretation of law.
IANAL.
I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.
This can result in some bizarrely harsh sentences -- where a domestic violence victim firing a warning shot at her abuser gets 20 years in prison, or where someone who knowingly writes a bad check gets 25 years in prison.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'll go with yes. Alas, interpretation then falls to the definition and grammar of every part of said law.
Perhaps most importantly, this will serve to make the law shallower. Currently, many laws are passed with large parts in reference to other laws, definitions from 400 pages elsewhere in the text (themselves with referential connections to disparate locations), and providing a way to analyze the law programmatically will have inevitable analytical benefits that allow citizens to know exactly how the sausage is made, whose farm the animals are coming from, and how it's been spiced.
* The law is inconsistent and possess contradictory rules. From contradictory premises, sound arguments
* It gives concrete examples of legal cases and how completely opposite judgments could be rendered, both being based on correct use of laws and analysis.
* Laws are not applied impartially, are not neutral, apolitical nor objectively applicable by judges. People who believe they live under "a government of laws and not people" tend to view their nation's legal system as objective and impartial. Obey and subject themselves.
* There is a cognitive dissonance between the laws and the people who make them. People generally believe that the law are generally good and should be obeyed. People generally believe that politicians tend to be corrupt and influenced. The people who make the law cannot be trusted but yet the laws they write should be.
Even this isn't necessarily a good thing. Part of the value of a judge is having an empathetic element in the position of final arbiter. Decisions aren't always "GUILTY / NOT GUILTY"; they're often long-form essays discussing the merits of the case, the factors under consideration, the logic and reasoning behind the ultimate conclusion and so on.
Math is nice because it can be reduced to a symbolic language. We're not at the point where we can reduce human beings to symbols yet.
Good luck starting your own country with a legal system that doesn't require interpretation, or heaven forbid, lawyers.
It depends...
I actually tried to create this once (with a team behind me, in fact) with what's available or possible with the legislative info.
THOMAS theoretically published in XML, but it's missing a lot of info.
Not only is this info not published, it's not even stored. They still are literally passing bills around to each other in some cases. You'd have to sit in on committee markup hearings, etc.
Even the small amount that is published from markups or whatever doesn't tell you who did it, only that it was done.
Some committees were willing to give more info. None were willing to essentially publish the in-flight staff attorney or other versions that would tell you for real who changed something.
Remember also that hg/git diff does not display what really happened.
It is displaying "how can i produce version B from version A using some minimal or near-minimal set of changes", converted to a line (or sub-line) based set of changes.
This does not tell you history, only one possible set of changes.
THOMAS does publish some in-flight versions of bills, but again, it's not really enough to do what you really want to do. I can tell you a bill changed between introduction and markup, and was different again when it got back to the floor. I can even, in some cases, tell you what was amended/deleted. I can't tell you who did it.
(Well, i can tell you with some percentage accuracy, because we built a machine learning model, but ..)
In most Parliamentary democracies you can only propose amendments from one of the two chambers, so any amendment can always be traced to the Parliamentarian who moved it.
Many laws are passed jn bundles and require compromise. Just because your Senator voted to support farm subsidies, doesn't mean he likes them - it just means he wanted a minimum wage increase to pass more.
This could in turn mean a reduction in the cost of litigation, which would hopefully be passed on to the rest of us.
Hopefully I won't get sued for that statement.
James Duane, Regent Law School professor, defense attorney:
"Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.” http://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc?t=5m18s
Supreme Court Justice Breyer:
"the complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation." http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-93.ZD.html
Nevertheless it is a very good thing to see the the gov't publish (most of) the law in an easy to use format.
Semi-intelligent queries can be executed, such that ignorance of the law might be abated. Imagine saying "Siri, is it illegal to do X?" and Siri answering you. This is important, because of the "Three Felonies a Day" syndrome with unwitting violations of the law. http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
Right now lots of people do this manually.
Maybe computers can do it better.
If computers can do it better, maybe people could focus on writing new laws and refactoring old ones instead of repeatedly interpreting old laws for each case.
If we could invent a computer interpreter that acts as a judge, laws and contracts being its code might make it obvious to lawyers why it doesn't make sense to allow code to be patented.
Every time lawyers would write laws or contracts they would have to avoid using legal ideas that have already been patented subjecting them to the same legal difficulties software developers face every time they write code.
I guess I should patent that invention.
<tr style=" -uslm-lc:II22; "><td style=" text-align:left; vertical-align:top; border-right:1px solid black; padding-right:2pt;"><p style=" text-align:left; text-indent: -1em; padding-left:1em;">
Wow. I wonder what -uslm-lc does.
EDITED TO CLARIFY: The tragic part isn't that the schema is given in XSD but that it's defined in XSD, which lacks RELAX NG's simple semantics and composibility rules. For a good summary of what I'm referring to, see James Clark's message to the IETF on the subject:
Pretty much every popular & widely used language / platform has XSD support... hell, it's so commonplace there are probably schema aware xml parsers in Brainfuck, INTERCAL and Befunge.
RELAX NG may well be a better choice, but saying this is "tragic" strikes me as a bit of excessive hyperbole.
I would say that the 'law' is just subjective manual process, and we desperately need more tools for every-day judgement and decision making.
For example, if there were a computer system that logged all corporate financial transactions including income, then we could automatically tax large corporations, rather than waiting for them to report income through loopholes.
Feel free to contribute.
Whereas, I would like to see the drafts and how they progress behind closed doors with all the lobbying influence.
However though the file claims to be UTF-8, vim seems to disagree, at least for title 10. I can't tell what encoding it really is though, doesn't seem to be latin1 or windows-1252 either.
I did notice the section references look a little strange in vim, e.g. "act Aug. 10, 1956, ch. 1041, § 1" near the top; it consists of c2 a7 (section sign), which looks fine, followed by e2 80 af (narrow no-break space), which shows up as a box in vim.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2004-title38-vol1/content-d...
"Following a 1999 feasibility study on XML/SGML, the Committee on House Administration adopted XML as a data standard for the exchange of legislative documents" http://uscodebeta.house.gov/download/resources/USLM-User-Gui...
It took the US Govt 17 years to release 200,000 pages of the US code in XML.
Interchanging formats should be relatively easy. Back in 1999, json wasn't even around.
IMO in today's API centric, and javascript ruled world. json would be a lot more useful.
XML is a superior format for semantically marking up content from a very detail-oriented dataset like this.
Heck they didn't even bother to include a way to inherit styles, they are just included in every case.