Washington DC Made GitHub Its Official Digital Source For Laws (arstechnica.com) 66
"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."
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
FYI: The acquisition is already complete.
Unfortunately not particularly useful. (Score:1)
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 t
Re: (Score:1)
Not the law, just their formatting tags and footno (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Ps a citation for you (Score:2)
"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.
You insult someone by calling them a homosexual? (Score:2)
In your mind, the worst insult you can come up with is "homosexual recruiter"?
Your bigoted ideas went of fashion in the 1970s, bro.
Re: (Score:3)
An open records group (Public.Resources.Org) bought a copy of the annotated code of Georgia and published it online (think SciHub, but for law.) They got sued by the group that claimed to own the copyright. They took it to court, and, last month, won their court case [aclu.org] The Supreme Court may overrule the Appeals Court, but it's now at that level (and doesn't seem likely).
From my understanding, the case hinges on the fact that the judges and lawmakers are actually
Close, but drafts would be even better. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
It's no different from the way most non-trivial software projects are managed. A source control system automatically keeps track of every change made and who made them; you can get a complete audit trail of changes and recreate any old versions at will. In practice the process is very simple, all the complicated clerical tracking is done by the software.
Personally I think many other kinds of work would benefit from using source control software. I have writer friends who complain about keeping track of
Re: (Score:2)
LibreOffice, MS Word, and most other credible writing tools have a "track changes" option which does this.
It is also possible to tell LibreOffice to store documents in a form compatible with version control but hellishly difficult to find out about the feature (also applies to most LibreOffice features).
Relevant to previous statement:
The Internet des
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the same as "track changes", which has basically a linear concept of change.
Re: (Score:3)
I'll out myself here but I have a really hard time getting the hang of git...
So yeah, it's nice that it's easy for you but their apprehension is not completely unfounded.
Re: (Score:2)
I recommended bzr (now breezy) based on its beginner-friendly interface. But if you are working alone, the subset of git you need to master is pretty small.
Re: (Score:2)
"inserts something into a law, "
That's legislation, even if it's merely DC.
Which should, SHOULD be proposed to, and ratified by, the city council (or whatever). The public isn't inserting into law. alt least not legally.
I suppose the council can authorize the changes to the repo. But it's not random insertions...
Re: (Score:2)
This really applies more to Congress, where favors get anonymously slipped into bills at the last minute. But even in city laws, the bills are drafted by the city council and, for larger cities, edited by staff.
Blockchain based lawbooks? (Score:2)
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.
Re: Blockchain based lawbooks? (Score:1)
Git supports PGP signatures on commits; so yeah, it's like blockchain but with less dispute resolution built in.
I had a job applicant farm out his code sample to an Indian contractor. I caught him because they used GitHub and the only commits that were his were merges from the contractor. Imagine having such a system show how many of our laws are written by lobbyists.
Re: (Score:2)
So the people giving the candy... and they pay more attention than the general public...
Re: (Score:2)
When slashdot fixes the quotes problem, or at least gets editors who proofread.
Donawithahatontrademarkt hold your breath.
I wish this submission was on github.com (Score:1)
Here's my pull request for typos, misspellings, and â(TM) fixes.
I've never used github. Is it a decent VCS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I've never used github. Is it a decent VCS? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Law on uncontrolled server? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Git (and really any DVCS) already handles this problem. Since a complete copy is always stored locally, any attempt to rewrite Git history will cause people to see unexpected merges or errors when updating their local repo. Not to mention if any of them issue a "git diff master origin/master", they would immediately see the changes. For the very paranoid, they can also add another remote repo that belongs to someone they trust, and compare it with the one on GitHub.
Creating a Git repo is probably one of the
I really like this (Score:3)
Just my 2 cents
Why XML and not markdown? (Score:1)
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.