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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?"
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.
If you can't convince them, confuse them. -- Harry Truman
I have built a version controlled document management system around mercurial for my wife's architectural practice. I have found it very difficult to convince users to follow the conventions we use for software. They are too used to putting version and project information in file names. It means nothing for them to rename a file from a.dxf to a_new.dxf and commit it.
The formal structure of software tends to keep this behaviour in check. The environment we are talking about here may be formal and controlled enough for this to work, but it is going to take training and enforcement to get it to work.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
Legal code these days is the equivalent of assembly language, it's complicated but it describes on a low-level what has to be done. While it's fine and dandy, the problem these days is that too much code is produced. Hence I propose that we make a GCC-Legalese or LLVM-Legalese fork so that we can -Os legislation. Better yet, we could simply write law in a higher level language, intent, and the compiler's intent preprocessor would turn that into faithful lower level code.
I also propose that we start forking Valgrind as to automatically find legal loopholes, conflicts and grey areas before a law is passed. Finally I think we should rewrite common law in Objective-Law++ so we can benefit from the many advantages offered by objection-oriented law over procedural law. Any thoughts on Convict Collection?
You just got troll'd!
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.
1. 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.
2. Corner cases. There are lots of these. Much like software, they are usually discovered in "maintenance mode"; ie after the law is passed. As time goes on, legal draftsmen begin to include lots of standard boilerplate, which will only rarely actually be applied.
3. Legal draftsmen. Never heard of these? Who do you think actually sits down and writes the law? It's not the politicians. They give drafting instructions, which are translated into legalese.
Expecting politicians to read and comprehend legalese is a bit like expecting businessmen to read and comprehend assembler. It will never, ever happen. The idea of "plain english" law is a lot like "automatic programming". A total pipedream that will never happen.
The law is a semi-structured language. You can think of it as a distributed rule system created by a mix of engineered modules (Acts of Congress / Parliament) and reverse engineering.
The reverse engineered parts are case law. Lawyers feed in black-box test cases, then carefully record what the CPU (the judges) output. Over time they map out what the law "is". The reason legalese repeats the same phrases over and over again is because they have been proved, in court, to have specific and reliable semantics. "It ain't broke", so to speak.
I personally think there's enormous scope for borrowing software engineering practice and tools for legal drafting, but it's no panacea. I even used to think that we could treat legalese as a kind of assembler and develop a higher level language that "compiles down" to it. But it doesn't solve the problem, just moves it around.
Laws are flawed and problematic because they deal with humans. Humans who are complex and motivated and intelligent. No purely rule-based system will ever completely tame human ingenuity, just as no code will ever fully describe all subject domains.
Disclaimer: I used to be a law student, until I came to my senses.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
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.
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.
You are kind of missing the point. Congress doesn't want us to know what the bills say, and they don't want to really know what the bill says. If they don't actually read the bill, they have plausible deniability. If you can't read the bill, then they can say you don't know what you're talking about, and if that doesn't work, they'll just call you a racist for disagreeing. Take health care for instance. What Obama and the Democrats have been saying the bill does is not what the actual bill says. They are playing a magician; they want you to watch what there right hand (what they say) is doing while the left hand (what the bill says) is doing something else. Didn't you have a problem when Obama broke his promise that we'd be able to view bills a week before they are passed (see here)? Aren't you bothered that most in Congress don't read the bill before they sign it, and then try to tell you what it actually does? They are trying to reform health care in America without actually reading the whole bill! Ask your local Representative if they read the bill before they passed it back in August. Anything that expedites the process of you being able to read what is being passed will not be done. This is business as usual.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Have you seen the size of these bills? That size and the complexity of the language means that there is no way any congress person could have read the bill. Even the author of the bill, has probably not read the complete text.
That is not as big a problem as it sounds, though. Each congress person and the committees have staffers whose job it is to do just this type of thing. They have teams of technical experts (analogous to software developers) who understand the code of the law. This is one reason that policy debates often focus on reports from all sorts of obscure government agencies. You need highly technical experts to comb through this stuff and make sense of it. The policy debates get down to which set of experts you believe and trust.
I think a lot of us think of congress people as coders who are working on the law, but they are really more like vice presidents directing teams of coders in broad policy directions. In that sense, it is okay (and even preferable) that they not micromanage too much.
"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
As long as people walk into the voting booth going, "I have no idea who to vote for. I'll just vote for the name I recognize," politicians will sit in office for year-after-year. I suspect this is how we end-up with these lousy politicians like Conyers, who never bother to read the bills, and who should be kicked-out. We should be encouraging people NOT to vote if they have absolutely no clue what they are doing. i.e. Don't vote just for the sake of voting.
This is what I did in the last election - I voted for my president, my senators/congressman, and then saw a whole bunch of names for lower-level people I never heard of. Rather than make a random guess, as many voters do, I just left that part of the ballot blank. Sometimes a non-vote is better than just putting the previous bum back into office.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Also when they do refer to the bill, they do so in a dishonest fashion. When our president said "Does not provide coverage for illegal residents," and some guy yelled "You lie", the congress persons and other media commentators immediately looked at the bill and said, "Right here - will not cover illegal immigrants."
Yes it does say that. What it did NOT say, which nobody realized until about a week later, is that patients were not required to show any ID. 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.
This bill just like the Patriot Act has a lot of loopholes and flaws, which will only be discovered later, after it's passed. And when the Congressperson says, "I didn't know that was in there," they should be immediately voted out.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
How is that different than the situation we have today?
The taxpayer would get stuck with all of the unpaid hospital bills (right now the hospitals eat them or try to make up the cost on those who have credit and can pay). Right now you only pay if you visit the hospital, but if the taxpayer has to pick up the tab then everyone pays regularly, even healthy people who rarely need hospital services. As bad as the present situation is this only makes it worse. The grandparents are correct: this bill is dishonest and the Democrats are pushing it dishonestly...period. Why do the Democrats shy away from having a head on debate about socialism and socialized medicine? Shouldn't they be proud of their socialism? Why do they try to sneak it through the back door? If their true position is too weak to stand up to real debate then they deserve to fail.
Bullshit. Are you so fucking stupid as to believe that you don't already pay for their health care? Really? Are you that ignorant as to how this all works? Do you have Beck and Limbaugh cock shoved so far up your ass that you just can't see straight? You, me, all of us already pay for illegal aliens who go to hospitals for emergency care because by law they must treat anyone who comes in for emergency treatment. So how do you think this is paid for? Do you think hospital administrators wave wands that shoot magic pixie dust in the air to summon the money? So they jack up the prices. These prices get reflected in your insurance rates. Furthermore, what if they modified the bill to require ID. Do you know how easy it is to fake ID? It happens every day at every bar in America. Should the hospital tell the guy bleeding all over their floor to wait a few days so they can do a full background check before they treat people? Seriously, wake the fuck up to reality. You just don't get it. You're so concerned about the "socialism" bogeyman you can't see the forest for the trees. There is no capitalism in health care as it exists today. There is no real free market for health care except for things that aren't covered by health insurance. Public health care actually creates freedom because you're not dependent on a corporation to take care of you.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?