Github: United States Code

by wh-uws • 14 years ago

222 54 14 years ago

daeken• 14 years ago

Interesting project. My first thought was: Great, changelogs! But then I started thinking a bit deeper and realized that what I'd love to see happen (on a related note) is a site/repository where you can see not only the legislation but the relevant case law over time.

thinkcomp• 14 years ago

We are working on this at http://www.plainsite.org.

NatW• 14 years ago

The perfect match might be my friend Mike's awesome and free open source project: He's improving it all the time and would welcome contribution: http://courtlistener.com

It originated as a graduate school project of his at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

It would be great if they inter-operated.

azernik• 14 years ago

Funny tidbit - in the first statute in Title I, Chapter 1 (basically top-level definitions - "Words denoting number, gender, and so forth") it was considered important to include among the 10 definitions the following:

'the words "insane" and "insane person" and "lunatic" shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis;'

Interesting that that was considered to be up there with the legal definitions of "person", "officer", "oath", and "writing".

crusso4• 14 years ago

Fascinating. I love it. Just looking through the comments here and at some of documents, I've learned a few tidbits that I never realized before.

Right below the part you referenced:

> the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, > companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and > joint stock companies, as well as individuals;

So, there's a justification for the Citizens United decision right there. Congress said it was so in the definitions of Title 1, Chapter 1. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that. Still interesting, though. If Congress wants to change the CU implications, they can start by changing that definition right there.

saraid216• 14 years ago

I'm guessing that's necessary to provide the basis for the insanity plea.

m0skit0• 14 years ago

Very nice idea if there was a REAL democracy, but I doubt this will be suitable to the law-makers, because most of them don't want people to know how this process is, let alone know what laws are being discussed, and even worse, who and what did he/she patch...

crusso4• 14 years ago

What you say is very true. Dunno why people downvote a little truth when it's stated clearly.

If what you said didn't have a strong grain of truth in it, then there would be no need for this project. Our laws would naturally be more straightforward, clearly written, and better organized because they're so important to society.

There are some really strong forces that oppose simple and clear laws. Some of them are more natural results of maintaining a complex system. My feeling is that a lot of the code ugliness is due to the selfish needs of those in power.

In HN terms, the current system is Proprietary. This GitHub project is looking to add some Open Source goodness to the mix. I think it's a really wonderful idea, since the very act of shining light into the enormously daunting spaghetti code that we have to live by every day may help to wake people up to the unneeded obscurities, contradictions, redundancies, anachronisms, wastes, and outright abuses of power.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

There was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968653

newhouseb2• 14 years ago

Note the author is talking about SVN and not git. I haven't used SVN nearly as much as I have git but from what I understand git is likely better suited for combining many different change-sets into many combinations efficiently (according to Git's Wikipedia page it was designed with "non-linearity" in mind), which would seem to mitigate the some of the issues around merge conflicts the OP brings up with respect to SVN.

gioele5• 14 years ago

I was referring to SVN because when I started working in this field SVN was the up-and-coming SCM. You can s/SVN/git/g and still get the same result.

Versioning the text of the law is not a problem. It is a solved problem. Every decent legal office has access to a versioned text of the law. The new challenge is the versioning of the legal content (or _meaning_ if you want) and the (semi-) automatic creation of consolidated texts at a certain point in time. The last point is difficult because the consolidated version is not a single document but a set of possible documents.

See also the other answer I gave on the difference between text and content: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023109

felipe_csl• 14 years ago

I'd like to see people forking and making suggestions to that, opening pull requests etc.

malkia2• 14 years ago

In the near future:

- http://github.com/senate - http://github.com/president

irfan• 14 years ago

Interestingly http://github.com/president is guy from Russia

ryancarson• 14 years ago

This is a great idea, but won't work because legal text is so obtuse. We need plain-english wording on all this in order for everyone to interact with it.

miniatureape• 14 years ago

I've always wondered if it were preferable to have some more formal legal language to remove ambiguities. Would writing laws or parts of laws as 'programs' help cut out loop holes in say, tax law?

Lukeas14• 14 years ago

Problem is there isn't an efficient enough 'compiler'. To see if a law works it has to be tested in court, a long, expensive process.

sethg• 14 years ago

Sometimes legislators want the law to be ambiguous, because an ambiguous law can get 51% of the votes but a law that actually spells out all the details would only get 49% (or less).

And I’m not sure it’s possible to have a completely unambiguous language for dealing with relationships between human beings. The architects of Lojban have made some heroic efforts in this regard, and while that language does a lot to delimit ambiguity (e.g., if a sentence has no explicit tense markers, then it is not asserting whether the event is past, present, or future), but it can’t eliminate it entirely.

chernevik• 14 years ago

This is like asking for plain-english compilers. IANA lawyer, and never wish to be one, but it's just a fact that legal process involves particular concepts that are represented by a specialized vocabulary.

Legislators tend to "add features" and "fix bugs" by hacking in special case handling, turning the code into a mass of hard to follow exceptions. I definitely think they do this in part because no one fires the one guy who understands the undocumented spaghetti code. But even if they placed some value on elegance and simplicity they'd still have to use some legal jargon.

generateui• 14 years ago

I placed the 2010 Dutch Pirate Party (Piratenpartij) election program on Github. I try to elad by example: Set the example by the "internet party", then hopefully others copy & paste it.

https://github.com/generateui/VerkiezingsProgrammaPiratenPar...

blibble2• 14 years ago

the UK parliament basically does this already:

here's an example of an act that's been modified: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/41/79?timeline=true

and an example of a bill going through parliament: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/financeno4/docum...

lloeki• 14 years ago

France has a similar, web-wrapped project:

http://legifrance.gouv.fr/

It started small and iteratively adds more and more features.

I always envisioned some access to this through something like git or Time Machine.

gioele5• 14 years ago

Please note that there is clear distinction between the timeline of the text of an act, its enacting process and its legal content (the legal "meaning").

The text and process timelines (the easiest to create and visualize) are interesting from a journalistic point of view but useless from a legal point of view. You rarely care about the text of an act at a certain point. What you really care about is the state of the law, the sum of all the _effects_ of all _acts_ in a precise moment.

For example it may be interesting to know that on 31st December 2011 an act as been enacted that says that on the 1st of July the new tax code will be amended to read "The taxation level is 10%" instead of the previous "The taxation level is 30%", but what I really want to know is "what is the taxation level today, 25th of May?". Taking only the text into account will not give you the correct answer. What you need is a more complex system that "merges" all the intended actions written in the acts into a (mostly) coherent state of the law.

Versioning the text of the law is not difficult, neither has been difficult since the days of CVS. The hard task is to extract the legal meaning from the text and create time-and-context-bound actions from that.

blibble2• 14 years ago

yes, you're right in that versioning is not technically difficult, but getting the establishment to consider doing it (let alone actually doing it) is a major milestone.

apaprocki2• 14 years ago

Positive law codification seems relevant, then:

http://uscodebeta.house.gov/codification/legislation.shtml

jedberg• 14 years ago

You're missing the point. The versioning isn't to help me determine the meaning.

The point of the versioning is so that I can see which representative made which change, and from there derive which ones actually have my best interest in mind.

apaprocki2• 14 years ago

The US Library of Congress does this for House/Senate bills as well.[1]

It also seems like they're creating a new website for browsing the U.S. code with more features for viewing amendments and source credits.[2]

[1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./list/bss/d1...

[2] http://uscodebeta.house.gov/browse.xhtml

neilkelty• 14 years ago

Love the "idea". This has been written about extensively on Quora with some very interesting discussion. * http://www.quora.com/What-can-lawmakers-learn-from-computer-... * http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-nontechnical-barriers-to-a...

I fear we'll find out that we really didn't want to know how the sausage is made.

there• 14 years ago

While it might be useful to have these in revision control, their format won't work as-is. Take this change for instance:

https://github.com/divegeek/uscode/commit/4b58ecaa6a6ea4b158...

Lots and lots of lines that don't change anything useful, and then the one change is hard to understand because it's wrapping a bunch of words causing extra changes.

I would recommend un-wrapping lines before commits and then have the presentation app smart enough to not show all of the lines where just a date in a header changed, doing word wrapping on the client side.

Also, without commit information, the changes are hard to wade through. Are there summaries or titles of the bills that can be used in the commit message? Who are the authors that drafted the bill and who are the "committers" that voted for it?

afthonos5• 14 years ago

This idea keeps cropping up, and it terrifies me beyond all reason. It's roughly as palatable as a direct democracy, because in effect, that's what it advocates.

People who deeply care about the law are already able, and willing, to find the information they need; I'm all for making it easier to manage, and there are worthy projects in that respect, but by no means do I want ordinary citizens to start dabbling in legislation. The Founding Fathers' romantic notions notwithstanding, running a government that provides important services to 350 million people isn't a side-job—it's a full-time job, and arguably a career. Heaping disdain on career politicians is absurd: if they're good at their job, of course they should make a career out of it.

Which brings me to the idea underlying all these posts: that by keeping close tabs on the intricate details of lawmaking, we can ensure that they will do a good job. I have heard this argument before. It came from this guy who wasn't really a coder, but wanted to keep close tabs on what the coders that worked for him did. So he started asking them to log in all their hours, with messages explaining what they were doing. And he started looking at the commits in the VCS so that he would see the actual code. Of course, when he didn't like something he would criticize. He would threaten people with getting fired if they didn't code according to his standards. The coders tried to explain that sometimes things have to be done in a way that's different from the "common sense" way, and sometimes he was even reasonable about it, but he still was not a coder, so he had no way of knowing what was involved.

That's who we're trying to become with projects like these. The most pointy-haired of pointy haired bosses. Our pointy hair wants points of its own, and all because we try to hold people accountable. That's a canard.

We want to hold politians accountable because we feel they are irresponsible. But what about our responsibility? Who hired these irresponsible politicians to steward us? We did. Instead of looking for ways to make politicians accountable, let's look for ways to make ourselves responsible. I would start, on an individual basis, by taking ownership of our part of the equation: our vote. Remember:

"Accountability is something that is left when responsibility is subtracted" -- Pasi Sahlberg

Let's find projects that restore our responsibility. From that, the rest will follow.

Aqua_Geek• 14 years ago

> Who hired these irresponsible politicians to steward us? We did.

Isn't there some value in making people more aware of what these "irresponsible" politicians are doing then, so that we don't keep lazily voting them in again and again?

Yes, those who care about the law are probably already involved. Shouldn't we be trying to get more people to care, though? More people getting the information from the source instead of having their opinions formed for them by the news anchor is a good thing, IMHO.

afthonos5• 14 years ago

I am less and less convinced that more information is the solution. If it were, we would already have the most enlightened era of government the world has ever known, since far more information is available now than there ever has been.

What we care about is narratives. And since narratives are fundamentally subjective, it's very hard to create a narrative that legitimately serves "the public good" while simultaneously satisfying the public. I hope there is a solution to this; I just don't think throwing more information at the problem is it.

maratd3• 14 years ago

> This idea keeps cropping up, and it terrifies me beyond all reason.

I can only hope you remain in a constant state of fear. This has nothing to do with direct democracy or democracy in general.

Please keep your pants on. The government already makes this data available. I mean, where do you think he got it?

These are laws. Laws that we, as citizens, are obligated to comply with. Failure to comply with some of these laws lead to jail or financial ruin. And we are utterly ignorant over 99.9% of them. Especially the minute changes that happen year to year.

The idea that one must hire a lawyer just to be made aware of what the law is or is going to be ... is so warped and disgusting, I just don't know what to say.

I applaud any effort that allows a citizen easy access to the laws that govern us and especially their constant flux.

> I would start, on an individual basis, by taking ownership of our part of the equation: our vote.

Who am I supposed to vote for? The guy with the nice hair?

This is exactly the kind of tool that will allow me to quickly determine where to place my vote.

afthonos5• 14 years ago

I was unclear. I am not alarmed by the data being available. In fact, I also mentioned that it's already mostly available. I am concerned with the idea that we need to pay close attention to the process.

> The idea that one must hire a lawyer just to be made aware of what the law is or is going to be ... is so warped and disgusting, I just don't know what to say.

Having the text of the law available will not help that. As others have pointed out, the meaning of the law is very different from its text, and that's what you pay lawyers to explain to you. It's a pleasant fantasy that the world is simple, but it's a fantasy nonetheless, and it will always be one in a large nation.

The only comfort we have is that, by and large, while we only know a tiny fraction of the laws we live under, it is only a little smaller than the fraction that affects our actions.

> This is exactly the kind of tool that will allow me to quickly determine where to place my vote.

No, it isn't, unless you're a lawyer or a legislator yourself. Understanding law is an expertise, not a casual hobby. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you disagree with this, there is little more to say. And if you think it should be different, again, I think it isn't possible, and I believe that a few days talking with any lawyer about whatever your favorite topic is will show you otherwise.

And so, if you instead rely on reading the US Code directly and making judgement based on your understanding of it, you'll be making gross mistakes, because you won't take into account Supreme Court rulings that will affect the interpretation, other, non-obvious parts of the US Code that directly bear on how certain passages must be read, and an endless number of arcana that make a real difference.

But you'll still think yourself qualified, and you'll vote based on that. Except you won't have read all the changes made every year, because how could you, so you'll really vote based on the subset a few people told you to focus on.

This is the irony: a seemingly useful thing, the availability of ALL THE INFORMATION, becomes a tool for shaping whatever narrative the people we trust want to shape (and I don't mean "want" in a malicious way). But because they will have the information at their fingertips, we'll assume that they have properly analyzed it, and pass judgements based on theirs, thinking we are basing them on facts..

> Who am I supposed to vote for? The guy with the nice hair?

I inverted these two because this answer is the critical one. You are supposed to try and meet your representative. You are supposed to talk to her, and listen to her, not as a politician, but as a person you are entrusting with an important job. That means pretty much ignoring the stump speech, and instead talking to her or her staff, seeing where they are coming from, and approaching to learn, not to judge. It's hard work. It's way harder than grep-ing for keywords in the repository, or look at the commit history of a particular passage we dislike. But that's where responsibility starts. Not with being hypercritical of every little thing, as we developers are so good at being.

superuser2• 14 years ago

>The idea that one must hire a lawyer just to be made aware of what the law is or is going to be ... is so warped and disgusting, I just don't know what to say.

Try this: The idea that one must hire an engineer to build a bridge, or even design one, is so warped and disgusting, I just don't know what to say.

The idea that one must hire a doctor to prescribe life-critical and potentially deadly medication, or even give a diagnosis, is so warped and disgusting, I just don't know what to say.

I'm not advocating keeping citizens in the dark. But there is a reason we don't leave this to amateurs. We have already seen the way small, out-of-context passages of law read by people who lack legal understanding can get blown out of proportion in the media and threaten the country's progress, if not well-being. Remember death panels? The anti-vaccine movement?

People participating too actively in processes they don't understand is a very real danger. It doesn't necessarily outweigh the benefits, but I wouldn't downvote someone just for bringing it up.

fghh45sdfhr32• 14 years ago

it terrifies me beyond all reason. It's roughly as palatable as a direct democracy,

Because direct democracy has been such a disaster for Switzerland.

afthonos5• 14 years ago

Switzerland does not have direct democracy; it is simply close to it. Switzerland is also a country with 7 million people, not 350. Yes, that changes things. We are more diverse, and more geographically and culturally separated, and that means we are more prone to distrust each other.

sailfast• 14 years ago

Would putting each legislator's changes in the open help their ability to compromise on difficult issues or hinder it? Sometimes it's easier to do the hard thing if nobody can be pegged as directly responsible.

That said, I suppose each committee could use pay for a subscription to do their markup "behind closed doors" before the final pull request hehe.

zashapiro• 14 years ago

Can you imagine how helpful diffs would be in the legislative process? Instead of combing through hundreds of pages to find new changes, losses, amendments, etc., it would all be right there.

Let's open source the law.

ahorak• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to fork this and apply a simple and democratic amendment system that allows all followers (or some other defined and growing population like Hacker News) to vote on changes.

I say we use a strict majority to determine the acceptance of these amendments and forge a document that reflects the multitude of views in the hacker news community.

What would be the results, both realistically and idealistically, I wonder?

Github: United States Code

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