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Washington DC Made GitHub Its Official Digital Source For Laws (arstechnica.com)
"Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia's legal code and corrected it using GitHub," writes D.C. based "civic hacker" Joshua Tauberer, adding "My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code."
The District does something with its legal code that no other jurisdiction in the world does (to my knowledge): it publishes the law on GitHub.... This isn't a copy of the DC law. It is an authoritative source. It is where the DC Council stores the digital versions of enacted laws, and this source feeds directly into the Council's DC Code website.... This is a milestone in the advancement of open government and open legal publishing.
No one should expect that editing the law on GitHub is going to become the new normal, however. My edit wasn't substantive. This sort of "technical correction," as lawyers would call it, didn't need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. I also happen to have expertise in this particular law, GitHub, XML, and the Council's new publishing process created by the Open Law Library.... GitHub's pull-request feature isn't going to replace public hearings, expert testimony, negotiations between stakeholders, votes by elected representatives, etc. -- and it shouldn't. Yet Open Law Library's new legal publishing process is groundbreaking. The Open Law Library is changing how we change the law...
Open Law Library's mission as a nonprofit is to make all laws as open and accessible as possible. The library's strategy is to achieve openness by making openness pay off for governments: it uses open, machine-readable laws to build software tools that make codification faster and more accurate. The cool thing about this is that governments can benefit from using Open Law Library's software even if open data isn't their highest priority, but in the background they'll still be publishing their laws in an open and accessible format -- everybody wins. Today, instead of authoring the DC Code in Word documents stored on a hard drive in a locked room in a basement, the Code is now stored in XML format in a place everyone can see -- on the Web."
The article notes that 18 more states have now enacted "Uniform Electronic Legal Material Acts" -- and that several other jurisdictions are already publishing their legal codes with official bulk XML downloads. "The US federal government began publishing XML downloads for the Code of Federal Regulations in 2009 and the United States Code in 2013."
But the District of Columbia "appears to be the first jurisdiction to combine the two by putting its legal code on GitHub and accepting a change from a member of the public."
No one should expect that editing the law on GitHub is going to become the new normal, however. My edit wasn't substantive. This sort of "technical correction," as lawyers would call it, didn't need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor. I also happen to have expertise in this particular law, GitHub, XML, and the Council's new publishing process created by the Open Law Library.... GitHub's pull-request feature isn't going to replace public hearings, expert testimony, negotiations between stakeholders, votes by elected representatives, etc. -- and it shouldn't. Yet Open Law Library's new legal publishing process is groundbreaking. The Open Law Library is changing how we change the law...
Open Law Library's mission as a nonprofit is to make all laws as open and accessible as possible. The library's strategy is to achieve openness by making openness pay off for governments: it uses open, machine-readable laws to build software tools that make codification faster and more accurate. The cool thing about this is that governments can benefit from using Open Law Library's software even if open data isn't their highest priority, but in the background they'll still be publishing their laws in an open and accessible format -- everybody wins. Today, instead of authoring the DC Code in Word documents stored on a hard drive in a locked room in a basement, the Code is now stored in XML format in a place everyone can see -- on the Web."
The article notes that 18 more states have now enacted "Uniform Electronic Legal Material Acts" -- and that several other jurisdictions are already publishing their legal codes with official bulk XML downloads. "The US federal government began publishing XML downloads for the Code of Federal Regulations in 2009 and the United States Code in 2013."
But the District of Columbia "appears to be the first jurisdiction to combine the two by putting its legal code on GitHub and accepting a change from a member of the public."
FYI: The acquisition is already complete.
Because almost every state uses British Common Law unless you know how the courts have ruled on a particular law. You don't know whether or not the courts have invalidated the law in whole, in part, or let it stand as is.
Also, the courts consider the legislative notes from the committee that drafted the law as to what the intent of that particular code section is.
More useful are the annotated codebooks that have not only the law but also how the courts have ruled on the law and how settled the validity of that law is.
Many states have granted copyright of the court decisions you need in order to tell what the law is to Lexis and other companies. It feels like it should be unconstitutional for a private entity to have copyright of information you need in order to tell if an action is legal or not.
Every time somebody inserts something into a law, it should be committed with a digital certificate so we know exactly who is giving out the candy to whom.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here's my pull request for typos, misspellings, and â(TM) fixes.
VCS = Version Control System. In other words, can it track a document as it s revised, and KEEP TRACK OF WHO REVISED IT. I've wanted this in government for a good 30 years, about the time VCS's showed up. I'm so sick of hearing on the news "the added amendment..." while having no way to find out who added the amendment.
Neither statutes nor court opinions are copyright Lexis Nexus or Westlaw.
What these companies have copyright on are:
Their formatting tags they add (copy-pasted text from them as plain text, unformatted, to avoid any problems).
The text of their notes about relevant cases, which they have selected and summarized.
So if Westlaw says this:
Subsection C was limited based on fair use considerations in Jones vs Smith (2012) regarding digital libraries.
You can NOT directly copy-paste that. You CAN write this:
See Jones vs Smith (2012)
Or this:
For fair use exceptions, see Jones v Smith
Or even put the entire text of the Jones v Smith ruling.
You just can't copy-pasted the exact words that LN or Westlaw wrote.
"the U.S. Copyright Office will not register a government edict that has been issued by any state, local, or territorial government, including legislative enactments, judicial decision, administrative rulings, public ordinances, or similar types of official legal materials." U.S. Copyright Office Practices  313.6(C)(2)
Not it explicitly says judicial decisions can not be registered for copyright. Yes I'm aware Lexis Nexus doesn't like that.
GitHub is basically a web-based frontend for git, which is the de facto king of VCSes. Almost every open source project actively under development today uses it, and it's also commonly used by many closed-source software developers (including, for example, Microsoft, who also owns GitHub).
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Is it just me who sees huge risks in putting law on someone elses computer? The git repo admins rights there are laughable compared to root - that somebody else making your nice frontend stick nicely together with backend, able to do whatever with laws therein. Cloud still needs security, some of which it can not provide, at least in this form, without end to end encription and then some. I do not suspect Microsoft going in and changing a law, but why give the chance when temptation would be there already. Why arent they deploying the repositories on own servers?
Yeah, it was unfortunate, but understandable, that the Founding Fathers initially went with CVS - despite John Quincy Adams’ strong advocacy for SVN.
Regardless, it’s good to see that the city of DC, at least, has upgraded to git.
#DeleteChrome
All regulations and laws at all levels of government should be public domain. ATM they are not!
;)
Just my 2 cents
When slashdot fixes the quotes problem, or at least gets editors who proofread.
Donawithahatontrademarkt hold your breath.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
itâ(TM)s good to see that the city of DC, at least, has upgraded to git.
I wish DC would tell *all* of the legislators there to GIT and stay git.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I wonder what would happen if they made it a wiki instead of using github. Just let anyone edit the laws as they see fit, and get rid of congress.
Blockchain based lawkeeping. Can't argue with that, because it would at least show what laws got passed/modified/repealed. Hell, Git is one small step away from being a blockchain, it just needs some crypto signatures for every commit, modification and push to the repository.
I can't argue with this.
The tricky bit will be dealing with the 'garbage in/garbage out' problem. As a technical matter any vaguely competent VCS, ideally with cryptographic signatures(whether integral to the design or bolted on; conveniently CACs and PIVs already support signing, so a lot of fed-level IDs do signing in addition to authentication) can keep track of who changed what when; but there is no technical fix for people dumping big ugly blobs that probably represent dozens or hundreds of internal changes into the publicly visible system as a single commit.
Even that beats the 'somebody changed something at some time, we think, because it's definitely changed now and we just passed it by voice vote' system we currently have; but I'd expect to see a lot of cases where a chunk of law, carefully prewritten, gets committed by someone's deniable junior staffer with all the care for mainline compatibility exhibited by a shoddy router vendor engaging in minimum-necessary GPL 'compliance' by vomiting forth their hideous BSP lump.
Can't beat the system once you do commit; and you can enforce at least one interaction with the system by mandating that the authoritative text of the law is the one that comes out of the VCS; but if someone is feeling uncooperative they can deny the system a lot of information by sticking to 11th hour giant blob commits.
In your mind, the worst insult you can come up with is "homosexual recruiter"?
Your bigoted ideas went of fashion in the 1970s, bro.
These laws need some basic formatting and links. Markdown provides that and is much easier to use, read, understand and modify. So why are they using XML?
My guess is that they exported the laws from word as XML because that's built-in, not caring about what to do next.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.