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Legal Code In a Version Control System?
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?"
The idea is fine and good, but the system probably runs too far behind everything else to take this up for some years to come.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
CHANGE THE LAW. Keeping the bible in Latin worked only for the priests and keeping the law in legal speak is working only for the lawyers.
In a perfect world, where politicians and citizens wouldn't be digitally illiterate, a VCS woud be ideal.
Git could be used, in the sense of direct democracy and participation: anybody could propose changes, let them be voted and propagated up the hierarchy, and get them approved as the official laws of the state. Laws would even carry the full history of amendments (commits) and the names of the people who actually wrote them. /me dreams
As PJ (over at Groklaw) likes to say, law is squishy.
Source code and law look a lot alike, but we have to remember that law is squishy.
We also should remember that lawyers are often seeking for an advantage for their clients (or constituents). This seeking for advantage runs counter to the work patterns of many of us who deal with free/open source stuff, but it is quite common in the legal world.
It would be a great tool for legislators who want the law to make sense, but such are too rare. The others would quickly find ways to pervert the tools.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Or, if you want to think the worst - perhaps those drafting the laws (frequently not those voting for them) don't want it to be easy to tell what changes a given law will introduce.
The complexities take power away from judges, I suppose, but then they put the power in the hands of the lawyers, who have to interpret the laws for the judges.
I prefer keeping the law simple and being able to recall judges who get out of control.
Injustices are going to happen anyway, the only way to deal with that is to learn rudimentary social skills, so you can get others to help you correct them. (Or am I being unreasonably idealistic in asking that?)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
... don't expect to actually read the legislative language ...
If United States Senators can't be bothered to read and comprehend the legislation they're voting on, then:
(1) why are they elected to posts that, as the most basic of job requirements, requires the ability to do so, and
(2) why haven't they been removed from office for complete and utter failure to serve the American people?
That's right, folks... your elected officials are attempting to pass legislation that will have massive consequences for our generation and several more to come, without having actually read the material they're about to vote on. Here's the best part: this is nonthing new. It's been the status quo for a huge chunk of Washington's electoral finest for longer than I've been alive. Outstanding work!
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
One big problem is that the content would need to be in a consistent format that minimizes the size of diffs, or it will blowup immediately. Line breaks, indentation, page breaks, and other artifacts of formatting need to be ignored to make it intelligible. I'm not aware of any version control system that does this. Is anyone else?
A few thousand people in the whole world can really understand the source code of the linux kernel. Why would Linus make it so complicated? Is this "openness" just another prank? No, some things are complex. To make laws is a highly complex issue, Of course, there are many problems with the processes of law making - but just simplyfying the language would not do any good.
So if he won't read the legislation, and says he can't understand it, why the fuck is he on any committee that is tasked with looking at specific pieces of legislation?
It would be sad, if it was not such an obscene state of affairs. Yet, it is a general indication of the state of politics and how it is trending. The election of George W. Bush, based on the persona he projects, was a clear indication that there are more and more people who are proud to be stupid. I'm not sure if the US leads the way in chasing ignorance, or just has a higher profile in doing so. I do know that, while entertaining to watch, this glorification of fucktardery made me shake my head when Forrest Gump was released. At least there, the stupid guy is good.
As to applying software development and maintenance techniques to legislation? Interesting idea. And the guy is talking bollocks when he says it is pointless to make legislation generally available for review.
Slashdot proves that concerned members of the public can read this stuff. We've got New York County Lawyer. So, yes, the set of people who can comment may be very restricted outside the legal profession. Yet, people like NYCL can give an interpretation of the legislation, sort of reverse-engineering it to whatever talking points the politicians fed to their highly-paid legalese generators. They can then point at the specific bits of the legislation, and you can judge for yourself if they match the analysis. Well, if you've not been indoctrinated to vegetate in front of Glenn Beck et al.
As long as you know where these volunteer legal analysts actually stand on issues, this would very valuable. They help tease out parts of the proposed laws that have obviously been fed into the process by lobbying groups who do not have the public's general welfare at heart.
Apart from the obvious implication that an elected official thinks, "the public who elected me are too stupid for me to make any effort to keep them informed of what I'm doing. It is a near-criminal offense to refuse to give people a chance to have their say on vital laws. In this case, the majority do want a public option, and in an ideal well-informed democracy those who do not would accept that.
As with all things political, and in a huge number of other areas, you should always follow Deep Throat's advice to Bob Woodward. Follow the money.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Maybe we should switch to more distributed (federalized? :) ) system? Like, allow states to branch laws in their private repositories?
E.g. with "death panels"?
Yes, and about every other publicized issue in the U.S. over the last 10+ years.
It's the whole "it doesn't have to be right, just repeat it enough until it sounds plausible" mentality. When you have a population that is so easily manipulated, you end up with critical issues being decided based purely on which terminology gets the most publicity.
More importantly, what they need is to use a formal definition of the law, coupled with a system that can check and prove there is no inconsistency within it.
It would also make law trivial to apply, since the system can simply deduce what applies in the given situations, which means we wouldn't need lawyers anymore, and the role of judges would be greatly reduced and simplified.
"Plain language version"? "Corrected"? "Translated"? "Legislation that is passed on"? What on earth are you talking about? This is horrifyingly wrong. There is no "plain language version". Legislation is not "translated". Committees report a bill with specific language; though it may be amended later (generally on the floor, or in conference) there is no "correction".
And "The legislative language isn't that important"? That is so amazingly, completely, and gravely wrong that I have no idea where to start debunking it.
Yes, I AM a lawyer and I work on issues involving legislation every single day, so I fully expect I will get modded down. The perils of crowdsourcing.
Penny - plain text accounting
Why not make the source itself a formal language? That way the idea of source code control for law would fall out naturally along with a better legal system.
From Example of Normalized English Input to NLESB:
Normalized English has been developed by Layman E. Allen and his colleagues; see for example, Layman E. Allen, ``Language, Law and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age,'' Computer Science and Law (Bryan Niblett ed.), 1980, pp. 75-100. Normalized language has been used in the Tennessee statutes (Tenn. Code Ann. sect. 33-6-104(a) (1991)).
An example of the form of Normalized English used as input to the NLESB system follows. Note that the formatting is for the sake of readability, and is not necessary for NLESB.
Subsection (a). IF AND ONLY IF
(1)(A) A person has threatened or attempted suicide or to inflict serious
bodily harm on himself, OR
(B) The person has threatened or attempted homicide or other violent
behavior, OR
(C) The person has placed others in reasonable fear of violent behavior
and serious physical harm to them, OR
(D) The person is unable to avoid severe impairment or injury from
specific risks, AND
(2) There is a substantial likelihood that such harm will occur,
THEN
(3) The person poses a "substantial likelihood of serious harm" for
purposes of subsection (b).
Subsection (b). IF AND ONLY IF
(1) A person is mentally ill, AND
(2) The person poses a substantial likelihood of serious harm because of
the mental illness, AND
(3) The person needs care, training, or treatment because of the mental
illness, AND
(4) All available less drastic alternatives to placement in a hospital or
treatment resource are unsuitable to meet the needs of the person,
THEN
(5) The person may be judicially committed to involuntary care and
treatment in a hospital or treatment resource.
Seastead this.
The health care bill requires that insurance policies all be written in "plain language" and refers to government regulations that define what that means. It should live up to the same requirement for all legislation. All bills should be clear, published for public review, brief, focused on a single topic, etc., in other words like good modular code that is subjected to peer review.
Many will assert that issues like health care are very complex and require complex legislation. This is not true for several reasons.
1) The U.S. Constitution is only 4,400 words and less than 10 pages.
2) Complex law is bad law because it will be subject to arbritary interpretation like our tax code.
3) Congress should not even try to manage our lives or the executive branch at a level of detail that requires thousands of pages to define.
4) The current practice is used purposefully to hide special earmarks and other features that would never pass if exposed to public scrutinany.
Translation: The voters who elected us are not only too stupid to make their own personal financial and healthcare decisions independent of government, but they are also too stupid to understand the laws that we are enlightened enough to impose on them.
They need to get over themselves. A friend of mine from Romania became a new American citizen this year. I showed him a "pocket" copy of the Constitution I have, and we started talking about it. He said that the greatest thing about it is its simplicity. Anyone with a decent vocabulary can read the Constitution and understand its plain language, even if English is their second language, even though it's now more than 200 years old.
It was a law written to be understood by the people. When the law is no longer simple enough to be understood by those who live under it, it becomes a weapon of tyranny.
And these politicians want to tell us that we are too stupid to understand how our own government works. They tell us this because if we believe it, they have power over us.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
I'm not aware of any version control system that does this. Is anyone else?
Huh? You're not aware of any version control systems at all? Strictly speaking it is the particular diff tool rather than the VCS that matters in this case, but every diff tool I've ever worked with has options specific to suppressing exactly the kind of trivial differences you've inexplicably cited as a "big problem."
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The problem is they're *all* "shitty bums." So it rarely matters what you do in the voting booth.
The root problem with our voting system is that it is specifically designed, both at the citizen level, and at the legislator level, so that any two uninformed individuals (of which we have a vast surplus) can outvote any informed person (of which we have a severe shortage.) Consequently, our system is degenerating at a steady pace, our liberties evaporating, our privacy eroding, our founding ideals moldering.
There is a (ridiculous) mindset out there that says that reasonably qualifying individuals to vote is "prejudicial"; these loonies imagine that it is racist or otherwise unfairly disenfranchising. However, the only people it disenfranchises are people who fail to become informed on the issues they're voting for. Obviously handing over this responsibility to a representative was supposed to solve the "uninformed" problem, but also obviously, it doesn't.
Watching the country implode upon its own founding precepts has become the national spectator sport. The chief betting issue being only whether the next blow to the country will come from the legislature, the courts, or the executive.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There's an enormous amount of existing code. Look at how much Slashdot talks about COBOL, which is around 50 years old. In common law countries (eg Britain, the USA and Australia), the law has code nearly a millennium old, written in a variety of languages.
Fortunately we're talking about a much smaller problem.
We're not talking about putting THE LAW into a revision control system. We're talking about putting THE STATUTES and PENDING LEGISLATION into a revision control sysetm. This excludes common law, administrative law, judicial interpretation and precedent, judicial striking of law for constitutional issues, judicial district differences in precedent, enforcement priorities, and a host of other things.
The constitution, the statutes, and their proposed revisions are exceedingly well structured for a computer-code-style revision tracking system.
Later such a system might be augmented to track things like judicial precedent, law review articles, history of enforcement, and the like in much the same way that current sysems can (or should B-) ) track documentation and its connection to code.
But the immediate target is eliminating the "too complex to understand so I didn't bother to read it" excuse that the legislators are using to pull con games on their opposition and the public.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way