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Legal Code In a Version Control System?

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-might-actually-know-what-they're-voting-on dept.

coldmist writes "Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) is on the Senate Finance Committee, which just finished work on the health care bill. The committee recently rejected an amendment which would have required them to post the legislation for public viewing for 72 hours before it went to final vote. Several senators felt that the actual legal code would be too cryptic and complicated to be useful. Carper himself said, 'I don't expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I've ever read in my life.' So, why don't they put it in SVN (or some similar version control system) where people can tkdiff the changes (i.e. new legislation is in a branch) or output a patchset? If a bill is passed, it's merged into the trunk. It just seems so logical to me, yet I can't find any mention of doing this on the web. What do you think?"

4 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lack of training/intelligence? by jonbryce · · Score: 3, Informative

    Lawyers generally use MS Word's version control system when negotiating new contracts. It may not be as good as CVS or Subversion, but it is at least something.

  2. Re:If the legal code is too confusing by alexhs · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think you're missing the point.

    Here is an example of bill.

    Go to section 3.

    You will see that the bill is actually a diff on previous laws.

    To read the law modified by this bill, you need to get the text of the laws referenced by this bill.

    Hence the idea of using a version control system, to be able to read side-by-side the law before and after the bill.

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  3. Re:If the legal code is too confusing by ianezz · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your analogy is flawed. Asking lawyers to drop legalese is like asking programmers to drop programming languages.

    If laws had the same nature of programming languages, we'd have robot lawyers by now.

  4. Re:Too early yet by Hatta · · Score: 3, Informative

    The bill as written allowed people to simply walk into a hospital and demand healthcare, whether they were american, illegal residents, or foreign tourists just dropping-in for a visit.

    How is that different than the situation we have today?

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