Why isn't there a Google for the law?
openlawlib.org
openlawlib.org
I had gotten a ticket for obstructing the intersection (the "anti-congestion" law in California that sought to limit gridlock by making it illegal to enter an intersection that you couldn't exit before the other light changed). I was fighting it and wanted to find other cases that had been decided on this law[1]. The only way to do that was to go to the public library and look through their published volumes of decisions and cases. So I thought here is a really useful thing Google could do, it isn't even a hard problem, collect the decisions that the courts publish anyway, and just connect the ones that are about the same part of the code. Match a number, match a date. And very useful to people who are fighting cases. It saved me some time and money [2]. But the idea never made it past the discussion stage because, as I was counseled, doing that would take on "powerful interests" who would really fight back hard and Google didn't want to draw that level of scrutiny. It wasn't until Carl Malamude started attacking this problem in earnest[3] that it became clear to me what it means to take away a revenue stream from lawyers.
[1] And learned this is called 'Sheparding' based on finding citations -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard's_Citations
[2] turns out there had been no case law on this particular law and lots of dismissals so I just entered a plea of not guilty at the clerk, and the court informed me a week before my trial date that the prosecution had declined to prosecute.
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150726/23080731763/even-...
You monster. :)
Of course why anyone drives in Manhattan is beyond me.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco,+CA/@37.7914...
The MTA has the right approach. At a number of intersections downtown the traffic enforcement guys just hang out at the intersection taking pictures and writing down license plates of folks who block the box.
It is disappointingly common. To the point you can unironically say: tickets are a tax on the busy, and those unfamiliar with or frightened by the courts.
This shotgun "see what sticks" approach is infuriating.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with CaseText but I do know the CEO as a result of being a legal operations software CEO and being in YC with them.
Why? I don't get it. Do LA drives really not know it causes gridlock? Or do they just not care. I remember talking to an uber driver who didn't even know what gridlock was, or why blocking intersectinos was bad. As someone from chicago, I was amazed. And even on HN, OP doesn't know that blocking intersections causes gridlock, it amazes me. I thought this was common knowledge. For some reason people in these gridlocked towns are skeptical that the law doesn't work.
for example, in downtown LA they blocked one street for a festival and the entire downtown became gridlocked. Ive never seen traffic this bad IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. All because of people blocking intersections. I was able to walk 10 blocks faster than cars did. I saw cars sitting in place for an hour and more. It was crazy. I've never seen anything like it. And when the lights turned green people still blocked the intersection. THEY WERE SITTING IN GRIDLOCK AND STILL DIDN"T STOP BLOCKING INTERSECTINOS. Like wow. I was dumbfounded. How are LA drivers so bad at driving?? I was so glad to be on foot.
It's a completely fair law; it's easy to follow, and it benefits everyone. blocking intersections DOES CAUSE GRIDLOCK. IF YOU STOP BLOCKING INTERSECTIONS, GRIDLOCK WILL GO AWAY. Get this through your head!
the problem is people dont know about the law in california, and don't have the common sense to figure out themselves. it needs to be enforced more. LA has some of the worst gridlock problems ive ever seen.
Lost count of the number of times I have been almost run down on pedestrian crossings but it's much better now than it was.
One thing that is very good here is that everyone gets out of the way of emergency vehicles very promptly.
My biggest pet peeve is that many people don't seem to understand slip roads and tailgating is rife. Also that patience is a virtue, if I'm in the middle of a 3 point turn on a country road then don't drive around me, just wait the 4 more seconds it will take me complete the maneuver. And parallel parking, don't get me started.
In the UK, it's pretty simple: "You may enter a yellow box junction when your exit is clear and there is enough space on the other side of the junction for your vehicle to clear the box completely without stopping."
It's not complicated. It just requires an incentive (don't break the rule, don't pay a 1000 GBP fine).
https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/red-routes/rules-of-red-rou...
There will always be that driver who attempts to change lanes mid-intersection to get into an opening first; that's part of what motivates American drivers to enter the intersection before their exit is clear.
(Lane changes within the intersection are illegal in the US, but rarely enforced.)
American drivers also accelerate quickly only to brake desperately, which creates "openings" for rapid lane changes as well as more trouble staying out of intersections. In spite of higher accidents, more fuel costs, and even occasional tickets (for not signalling properly), this is a persistent driver behavior in many areas like California.
This problem isn't specific to this law. There are many laws which aren't being enforced, but do exist. I'm from NL, and we're known for using bicycles a lot, and this is true. Yet bicyclers don't use their hand to show the way they go, they drive through red light, drive without light, and drive on the wrong side of the road all the time. And they get away with it because the cops aren't enforcing the rules.
> It's a completely fair law; it's easy to follow, and it benefits everyone. blocking intersections DOES CAUSE GRIDLOCK. IF YOU STOP BLOCKING INTERSECTIONS, GRIDLOCK WILL GO AWAY. Get this through your head!
Another reason it isn't working is due to selfishness plus ignorance. Inform drivers. Heck, teach it during driver license exams.
So,
1) Inform the users (in this case the general public).
2) Enforce the rules.
I would like to add laws need to be simple to explain, but I'm not so sure on how to describe that point.
I witnessed gridlock happen. At a particularly odd, 6-way intersection, people started edging the cars into the intersections. The light would change, cross traffic would get pissed, and then they'd edge around the blocking traffic creating a snaked grid. As cars moved out the way in the cross, the other section would block more and more until the whole intersection was blocked. It was a beautiful tragedy of bucket crabs[0] stopping progress for all. That's when I pulled into a nearby lot, called a friend, and just crashed with them for the night.
Maybe it's an east west thing, but here is a video of a guy complaining about people who DON'T enter the intersection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bcjCOzob4
Again, he is saying that the proper thing to do is to enter the intersection and sit, regardless.
So, it seems like the issue may be that in some areas this behavior is promoted (even in drivers ed classes) and in others it's illegal.
Of course, I am not from a large city that deals with gridlock, so that may be part of the difference.
It's different from gridlock because you know that when the oncoming traffic stops, there is somewhere for your car to go.
The whole point is to not have people clogging the intersection and preventing movement when the lights change. That's what creates gridlock instead of just a backup on one street.
We spent a lot of time building up a case law, pushing to open Pacer (meeting with the federal judiciary and offering to just pay the revenue they make), etc.
Scholar has pretty up to date legal data since then, from OCR'ing federal reporters to parsing it, to what have you.
In fact, ask Carl. We worked really closely with him and have helped fund him for years, both directly, and through public.resource.org (https://yeswescan.org/index.court.html - 9F is Anurag, who started/ran Google Scholar, 22F is the group I ran)
A lot of states have exclusive contracts with westlaw or nexis or what have you, so it's non-trivial.
The target was also to try to have data for the kind of situation you mention, not to try to replace the dedicate legal resources that exist.
Anyway, again, not sure why you think Google didn't do it.
Have you considered bidding for the contracts when they come up?
Wait what? You offered to pay the ~$145M/year they bring in for access fees in return for an open access PACER system? Was this offer just made to the PACER people or was it brought to the attention of the Judicial Conference?
(I realize there is a huge difference in those two numbers, but we were also idealistic and thought they might actually care about public access at the time. Look how dumb we were)
They are so underfunded otherwise they can't afford to give it up
Take a simple query I needed the other day: when is it proper to file a summary judgment motion before claim construction of a patent? The query "summary judgment before claim construction" on Google Scholar returns a bunch of highly-cited cases, and on the first page only one is even a patent case, and none answer the question.
In contrast, the first hit on WestLaw is a directly relevant case. It's a District of South Carolina case, cited by a single other case, but it answers the question! And that's with a free-form query, which I'd never do. One minute of planning to create a good terms-and-connectors search immediately returns mostly-relevant cases.
One day ~3 months ago, I spent >3 hours going 16km in Beijing, as large parts of the city were gridlocked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980961
They don't seem to have been targeted by uk lawyers. If anything they're a respected site.
I hope you lost.
Making court documents more publicly accessible was one of Aaron's projects (circa 2008). He and project collaborators downloaded more than a million documents from the government's PACER electronic access system using public library terminals and attracted the attention of the FBI.[1] Part of the goal at the time was to uncover privacy violations in filed court documents that were legally a matter of public record but behind a lucrative, government administrated pay wall.[2]
There is something important to be said for the social and moral importance of keeping the public record publicly accessible. The justification for these intermediaries to exist and extract rent from the cataloging of public information grows slimmer and slimmer, but cataloging and indexing everything in a common law (precedent based) system is tremendously expensive. I suspect that developing of an algorithm to usefully search the dense and interweaving web of judicial opinions, case history, written legislation, and jurisdictions in which all those elements apply/overlap/supersede each other is also a massive capital investment.
It all does have to be paid for somehow, and I don't think how to fund is a settled question. Pay walls clearly have pernicious externalities (privacy violations go unnoticed; access to law is practically limited to professionals for whom the costs are a business expense). But I don't trust the state to properly fund or develop such a service through general tax either.
Consider supporting the individuals in this thread who are working to make that sort of open information access in law a reality, and consider also who will seek rent from the finished service who will not.
You can republish... court docs are in the public domain. RPXCorp tried doing this with patent law. For a time, they made everything free. That practice didn't last and they now pass on their costs to customers.
1. Reasoning in law relies on complex language semantics, both in statute and case law. Take for example a court decision that says "in the circumstances of this case I do not agree that John v Doe applies". That can be expressed a million ways and I'm not sure our natural language processing can replace humans yet in this area.
2. There is a lot of copyright problems that need to be overcome. Companies like Lexis and Westlaw own the rights to a lot of decisions and even statutes and can paywall the . This is slowly changing however, for example in the UK recently the courts took back the rights to publish decisions.
That itself is a problem, while we have public defense lawyers, we don't have public preventive lawyers (who I can call and ask if what I'm about to do is altogether legal and what can I do to avoid run-ins with the law).
1. They are tasked to give well researched legal advice in all fields.
2. Their advice should be minimally restrictive.
3. If a person faithfully follows the advice of the office the office assumes criminal and civil liability.
Individuals are not capable of evaluating the law without the aid of legal professionals. Worse, individuals don't have the ability to evaluate the quality of lawyers. This system would allow individuals to be secure that they're not heading into legal gray areas or situations where the legality is truly unknown until there's a trial.
I like this kind of system because it's in the best interest of such an office to give the most accurate advice possible.
> 3. If a person faithfully follows the advice of the office the office assumes criminal and civil liability.
The problem is these two are in conflict. If the office gets in trouble for approving something they shouldn't then they'll have the incentive to be overly restrictive in what they approve.
A better solution is to make this office a subdivision of the justice department and then if they say you're allowed to do it then you can't be prosecuted for it. And if they say you aren't allowed to do it then you can hire your own lawyer to appeal the decision to a court, and they get penalties for being wrong.
If you don't want people looking for loopholes then don't put so many in the law. When you pass thousands of pages of tax code and then companies spend a lot of time trying to save themselves billions of dollars, what did you expect to happen? That's what happens already.
If there are laws out there that are currently applied or interpreted differently than their plain meaning as written down, that's a failure of government. Either legislators should have fixed a stupid law, or judges should have thrown it out for vagueness.
1) Educated lay-people. If you have good reading comprehension, and if your problem is one many other people have faced, there is a chance the law that pertains to your situation is clear and unambiguous. Access to the law in this case means you can resolve your issue.
2) Legal services at the margin. At the high end, where you are paying an attorney hundreds of dollars per hour, that attorney is passing database costs straight through to you, but you can afford it. At the low end, legal aid clinics usually receive free or reduced cost access to the databases. However, at the margin, when you are scraping together the money to pay a $30/hr lawyer to represent you in a civil matter, neither you nor the lawyer can afford to pay. It is in these cases on the margin where access to high quality laws can make a significant difference.
3) Secondary legal sources. Many legal aid clinics put out high quality secondary sources written at a grade school reading level. Where I volunteered, we had around 100. We could have had many, many more. They don't really take that long to write and the number of people helped per hour of writing was quite high. The problem, however, was maintaining them. Each document we added to our library represented a commitment of several hours to a couple days of work quarterly or biannually to review the law and update the document. It was this maintenance commitment that limited our ability to provide understandable legal documents. This time commitment can be cut by an order of magnitude by pushing pertinent changes to the law to legal aid clinics, rather than them having to sort through all laws for pertinent changes.
4) Government opinions. Many governments have legal departments that will provide opinions on the law. These opinions are often (though not always) written with a general audience in mind, and explain a particularly complex or often misunderstood part of the law. Unfortunately, these opinions are not easily discoverable, especially if you don't even know to look for them. Open Law Library works with jurisdictions to help them coordinate publishing, linking, and discoverability across branches and departments.
Into the future, as we build the foundation of computer-readable laws, others will build tools, apps, and bots on top of this foundation that will make the law truly accessible to all.
Well, that's incompatible with a common law legal system. Common law literally means that we respect legal traditions that aren't always codified and are instead established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition. That's the reason you'll sometimes see precolonial British law cited in US legal memorandums or court rulings - those laws literally are not part of US legal code, but they may provide persuasive precedent.
So there not always a codified law to read, but that doesn't mean people can't be expected to uphold the societal structure.
The same works in reverse. If a law exists, it's possible for the law to become legally unenforceable (for a variety of reasons, not just court rulings) even without the law being repealed. So merely providing access to the legal code doesn't actually provide a complete picture of what the law is.
Engineers want to think about the law the way they think about code - it may not always do what you expect, but Von Neumann architecture means that it's at least consistent. But that's not how the law works - it's not always clear ahead of time what the inputs are (which is why litigation is so complicated), and that's even before you account for the judgment calls that enter the picture at different stages.
If access to court decisions is restricted, they hardly qualify as "established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition", no?
If we stated that (say) criminal laws could not be enforced unless the defendant had access to the full body of possible codes and precedent before the crime occurred, we would literally never be able to convict a single case, ever. Because any defense attorney could just find some arcane memo and prove that the defendant could not reasonably have been expected to have access to it before the crime occurred, and that would be sufficient for excusing them of culpability. And that's not even raising the question of whether or not they could reasonably be expected to interpret and understand the text, which would be the next hurdle. (The same applies to non-criminal cases too.)
(Persuasive precedent is not binding, so it's not "law", but it's undeniably influential enough that it's necessary to understanding the law.)
Any historically accepted source should still be available for establishing precident but that doesn't mean our legal system should conceal the decisions it has made.
If nothing else access to these decisions could be a great area of study for language processing.
Yes, I agree with that. And in many cases (but not all), they are - court documents are generally available for nominal processing fees, though there's a long way to go before I'd say this is all truly "publicly available without [unnecessary] restrictions".
With some notable exceptions like FISA, I don't think most of the secrecy is out of a desire to conceal law from citizens. It's largely the fact that our legal system is shockingly low-tech and hasn't yet caught up to what technology now allows.
Are there ways to improve this? What do you think the hurdles to technology adoption are in this field? Is it a document formatting problem, or a hosting problem?
Do we need to create a WordPress for state and local courts to adopt?
This makes it quite difficult for me, as an individual, to interpret and act on what the law says. Sure, we all know the "basics" of criminal law: Don't steal, hurt, go where you shouldn't, etc. But everything else (regulations) is a giant black-box of "you need to speak to a lawyer" and pay them money. There are probably hundreds of sites and blogs out there trying to help/guide people about what the regulations say, but that's a poor substitute and not something you want to rely on for anything more than mundane. There needs to be a clear, government-run, up-to-date resource that has all laws.
> Engineers want to think about the law the way they think about code - it may not always do what you expect, but Von Neumann architecture means that it's at least consistent.
Well, that’s why Civil Law might be better – and why most Civil Law countries already have fulltext searchable archives of all laws and decisions. (the dejure indexing engine for Germany, for example, is quite awesome).
Clearly though, reasons for the texts to be free are obvious and reasons against it are less than before the proliferation of the internet.
Another issue is that the economics of codification and publishing disincentives existing publishers from releasing laws and codes in open and accessible formats. And without open and accessible formats, it makes it extremely difficult and unsustainable to build things on top of the law.
try {
fair (trail);
} catch (e) {
if (e == InconsistentLawException) {
// Oops, divided by zero,
// add a tiny epsilon to the denominator and keep going
law += epsilon;
} else if (e == ClassCastException) {
// some types are more equal than others
settlement (trail);
} else {
// escalate to higher instance
mapReduce (court);
}
} finally {
// might silently fail if
// higher_instance == SCOTUS and
// SCOTUS.busy == true
sentence (trial) . await (appeal (higherinstance));
}The problem with this line of reasoning is that it leads down the wrong path. Formally verifying the consistency of the law cannot be done in practice because it has NP-complete problems inside of it. The amount of work it would take to create a legal code which is internally consistent and always yields an agreeable outcome is not feasible.
But it's foolish to go from there to the other pole where all the laws are overly broad and the only thing that determines whether you go to jail is prosecutorial discretion.
The formally-verified internally-consistent always-righteous version of the law is the unattainable platonic ideal. You never actually get there but progress is measured by whether we get closer today than we were yesterday.
Always righteous wasn't required by OP, but ideally it's a mere consequence of consistency. If you preclude Consistency, the apriori
Is there something you can cite here? The infeasible thing to me is refactoring a pre-existing lawbase into something formally verifiable; if we could throw it all away and start over at the constitution, it might work.
You can easily pass a law that says all killing is illegal, but that isn't good enough. You either have to consider every possible thing that could happen in the universe and encode what should happen in each case into the law, which is clearly infeasible, or there will be things that can happen which you haven't considered ahead of time, and then you still have to specify something.
If what you specify is that unanticipated acts are illegal then everyone will be in prison. But if they aren't then it will be easy to find a provable loophole to murder. Neither of those is acceptable.
That's why we have judges. To address that. But that answer is still terrible because then you don't know what the law is until you're already in court. It's just less terrible than either putting everyone in prison or letting anyone get away with murder.
Which means the goal is to minimize the number of situations where that needs to happen, without causing the well-specified outcomes to be unrighteous.
Unlike what I think you are proposing though, our system must work with any law that is passed, not just laws we deem "correct". We simply write software that helps legislative bodies pass laws that are as close to what they deem correct as possible.
They have an online reader for all their legal commentary books. They've invested heavily in search. It is pretty fantastic.
Do you know of any similar companies more focused on CA? I'm specifically interested in the Vehicle Code.
They do have federal books as well that apply nation wide, but as most lawyers are highly specialized, that may not apply to what you do?
Im bummed to hear about point 2. We are all ruled by law, and the courts are a branch of government. Its not encouraging to know the legal documents that are used to govern me are owned and copyrighted by a private organization.
See in part: MATTHEW BENDER & CO. v. WEST PUBLISHING CO., 158 F.3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998)
1. From my admittedly limited experience legal language, while certainly complex, follows a clear set of rules to the extent its almost formulaic. There's no pragmatics (pragmatics is the main reason we don't have generalised natural language understanding yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics ) involved. Legal language is precise and its primary objective is to avoid ambiguity or potential for misinterpretation.
These features actually make legal documents a perfect area for application of NLP algorithms.
2. Frankly, I think this is outrageous. It's "Common Law" for a reason. How can one expect someone to abide by the law if the law is not commonly known but that knowledge is restricted to a select few? How law firms like those you mentioned could arrive at thinking about copyrighting legal decisions and thinking that's even remotely ethical is beyond me.
If it's not, the problem isn't with the software engineers...
Disclaimer: I worked on Google Scholar and am the CEO of Judicata.
A recent evaluation of various legal search engines [1] found: "The oldest database providers, Westlaw and Lexis, had the highest percentages of relevant results, at 67% and 57%, respectively. The newer legal database providers, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Casetext, and Ravel, were also clustered together at a lower relevance rate, returning approximately 40% relevant results."
Westlaw, Lexis and Google Scholar all have high quality citation parsing (i.e., links). And Scholar relies very heavily on PageRank (as [1] demonstrates). But it is Westlaw and Lexis that are the better search engines. That's because they have invested more into going beyond just links; they've invested a lot into understanding what it is happening with the law.
At Judicata our own findings are that the average legal search query is significantly more complex than the average Google query -- having more terms and more concepts. Moreover, whereas only 15% of Google queries are unique, the inverse is true in legal research: more than 85% of queries are unique. What that means is that in order to return a good result, you need to understand a lot more about the query and the documents you've indexed. You can't rely on links between documents and past searches and clicks to power a quality search engine (the way that Google.com can).
As has been mentioned in other comments here, the real challenge for legal research is extracting structure out of the law (Shepardization, Procedural Postures, Causes of Actions, Dispositions, Legal Principles, Arguments, Facts, etc.). That is what will get legal search engines closer to where Google really shines -- results that are powered by the Google Knowledge Graph.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2859720
But being public domain doesn't mean someone is required to OCR and host it for you. And it doesn't mean someone needs to go and OCR all the hundreds of years of old cases and OCR and host those.
Part of the reason why we are the only one providing something clear is that, indeed, law data is a mess, and we working hard to have a clean & consistent database.
As simple point as legal references is really complex. Every country has it's own identifier system , some editor have their own identifier system and people are referencing in really different manners...
The second point is that, we really heavily on NLP/DL to extract insights and informations about the data. This is something that couldn't have been done /easily/ in the past.
Shameless plug: We are hiring! https://doctrine.typeform.com/to/uyjXoE [French only]
Great, but for what position? This link is a multistep application form, and I am pretty sure others will find equally annoying to fill it up just to see the description of the job.
[Disclaimer: Cofounder here ;)]
I'd argue that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways that the average person can easily process or understand.
Furthermore, I believe this ambiguity directly impacts the governed, causing them to be, in general, distrustful of most laws that do not affect them in an observable way.
Making laws more digestible is only part of the solution; the "what" should be annotated with the "why". Otherwise, with so many decentralized cities in an already decentralized nation, fundamentally sound, universally-applicable legislation may be ignored due to stereotypes and generalizations. Whereas, documented and annotated legislation can be analyzed, duplicated, and modified to fit different environments around the country, or reasonably ignored on verifiable grounds.
So true. A premise of this blog post is that laws need to be easier for computers to understand, but that's skipping a step: making laws easy for humans to understand.
I really like what TLDRLegal did: made software licenses digestible by humans. I would love to see similar sites pop up for other verticals of the law, but it's a lot of work and there's not much incentive to get it done at the quality-level of TLDRLegal.
This is totally untrue. Legal documents are linked together with citations written according to very precise rules, which lawyers spend a lot of time getting correct. Almost all laws and cases are published in a quasi-append-only record: sequential publications in reporters organized by volume and page number. So unlike URLs on the Internet, 47 F.3d 167 will always refer to the same page of the same case. Forever. Most agency decisions, etc, have similar sequential records. Statues and regulations are precisely identified by structured citations as well. WestLaw and Lexis have no problem parsing these, and will happily find you all the cases that cite to say a specific Supreme Court case from 1880.
The reasons lawyers use terms and connectors searches instead of a "Google-like" engine is because the underlying concept of Page Rank absolutely sucks for legal research. Page Rank equates in-degree in the link graph with relevance. This will get you highly cited cases that you knew anyway that are only tangentially related to the cases you actually need.
In a legal brief, a couple of trial court decisions that are factually similar but uncited are infinitely more valuable than a highly cited Supreme Court case that happens to pertain to the same general area of law.
(1) The best case to cite is one where the previous trial judge ruled in favor of the position that's being taken on an issue by your opponent, but the trial judge was reversed on appeal on that issue;
(2) Next-best is one where the previous trial judge ruled in favor of the position that you're now taking and was affirmed on appeal; and
(3) The worst of all cases to cite is one where the previous trial judge ruled against the position you're taking and was affirmed on appeal; if you're going to cite that kind of case, you must find some way to distinguish your facts from those of the previous case.
It's great fun when your opponent cites a case in support of a position, and then upon reading the case you discover that the case went against the party that took your opponent's position.
EDIT: Which reminds me of a related story: My late senior partner, mentor, and friend, Tom Arnold, was once arguing a point before a judge. His opponent, seeking to discredit Tom's argument, cited a law-review article that Tom had recently published, where Tom had argued the exact opposite of the position he was taking before the judge. Tom didn't miss a beat: He responded, in effect: Your Honor, my friend is correct: My article does take exactly the opposite position from what I argue here today. I still hold to the view expressed in that article. What my friend hasn't told you is that my article criticized a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. No matter what my personal view of the Court's decision might be, it's the law of the land unless and until the Court changes its mind or Congress changes the statute. And under the Court's decision, my client is entitled to prevail.
Tom won the argument, of course.
It wasn't easy, and I'm not talking about the law itself here (though at 10 title long, with title III literally an anti-money laundering bill they bunged into the Act and had passed, it is still n extremely complex bit of legislation). No, I'm talking about the ability to find information on certain laws - I'm an Australian, so it was a major challenge to find good quality sources. I was lucky in a way, as the Patriot Act is so controversial I did eventually manage to track down info. But it wasn't easy, and when I tried to find sources for some truly ancient and tangential legislation a few times I hit a brick wall entirely.
It makes me think: ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it... but with the current system you are often going to be ignorant of the law no matter what you do! Unless, of course, you have the money to pay for expensive legal searches.
How anyone could consider resyricted access to information about the law and the law itself to be anything but a violation of human rights is beyond me.
Other than writing code, we need advocates in and out of government who understand and believe in the value of free (as in freedom) and accessible laws. Contact your local, state, federal representative and let them know that free and accessible laws are important to you. Let them know that a system exists that can not only make this a possibility, but that it will also make their lives a lot easier.
We would also love to hear about what you would want to build on top of computer-readable, always up-to-date laws that could programmatically alert you when something changed and let you diff against old versions of the law. E.g. a) internal annotations for civil servants that wouldn't immediately be obsolete once the legal code changed; and b) legal alert system for the part of the law you care about.
We'll put together a form that makes it easier to collect this information!
Previous attempts at accomplishing our mission saw organizations scraping government websites and re-hosting the laws on prettier websites. The problem was that a) the laws were only as up-to-date as the law the governments made available (which, unfortunately, are not up-to-date at all) and b) the projects were not sustainable because no one pays to access the law and websites needed updating every time the law changed.
Sites like these are potentially very harmful. They haven't been updated in years and people who stumble upon them and miss the fine print end up relying on laws that have long since changed.
Because timeliness matters, the only way to guarantee that we get it is by working directly with the governments. So we build software into the law drafting, codifying, and publishing process that governments can really benefit from and enjoy using. The software changes the economics of codification and publication and permits publishing the laws freely and openly.
But I think it is not as active as others stackexchanges.
I'm not associated with them at all, other than once emailing the founder best wishes.
One thing to consider is that on a day-to-day basis, an individual might be impacted more by city/county/state law than by federal law.
There's a change control system behind all this. Here's a history of a bill, again, in XML.[4] There are change transactions, which are also in XML, but they're not in this database.
[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata [2] view-source:https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS... [3] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS/114/2/hconres/BILLS... [4] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/114/sres/BILLS...
It is understanding that bills are patches, and thus the law works like darcs—patch-oriented rather than revision-oriented.
Does this sound correct to you? I arrived at this conclusion asking people who know nothing about VCS, so something mighthave been lost in translation.
I also hear the applying of all these patches is a slow manual process only done periodically? :|
The user guide for the XML data is on Github.[1]
[1] https://github.com/usgpo/bill-status/blob/master/BILLSTATUS-...
We can't build good tools without good data. The only way to get it is to work directly with governments and make it easier for them to publish their official laws as clean xml than to publish their laws as PDFs.
Revision control and the law deserves its own blog post. In addition to being patch-based, patches can be created today, but apply retroactively, or languish for years, then suddenly apply because a triggering event occurred.
Our system ingests official laws and outputs an xml version of the official law. A government attorney uses our IDE to review the xml output and annotate it with codification instructions. Our system then uses those instructions to automatically codify the law, which is then published openly on the web in multiple formats.
We have been rapidly iterating on our xml format. You can see the beta version for our first partner, the District of Columbia, here: https://github.com/dccouncil/dc-law-xml/tree/development (feedback welcome).
As we partner with more jurisdictions, we will build a foundation of open, clean, accurate, and timely computer-readable laws on which anybody can build tools to improve government, citizen engagement, and access to justice.
Hmm, interesting! I always assumed the patch applied immediately but the new law might contain some "effective z/y/z, ...".
This is rather unfortunate (of course not your fault), because as we all know rebasing is not necessarily conflict-free.
The common response to this has usually been "that's why you need s [jurist]", but I take issue with the idea that the legislation that applies equally to us should only be understood by those equipped with the means to make sense of it.
The crux of the article is that most legal research solutions have ignored the immense power contained in the links between laws:
> Laws frequently reference other laws in order to reuse definitions, introduce exceptions, or make it clear that two concepts are meant to work together. Consequential laws tend to get referenced in other laws as their influence spreads throughout the legal system. Experienced lawyers build up detailed mental maps of these links, allowing them to jump immediately to core issues of complex legal problems.
> However, most laws can only be searched using the dark-age, Lycos strategy—guess at keywords and hope—and it’s often necessary to pay for even that limited functionality.
We at Casetext are taking a very different approach than the "dark-age, Lycos strategy" that you have to pay for:
1. On Casetext, the law is free, as is basic search. Honestly, it's insane that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge as much as they do for basic keyword search over a database that should have been free to begin with.
2. We make money by charging for advanced, data-driven ways that lawyers can research more efficiently. CARA, our premium product, enables a lawyer to drag-and-drop upload a document they're working on, and will recommend the research that the lawyer missed but is very relevant to what they're working on (https://casetext.com/cara). A key ingredient behind this awesome tech is the network of citations that the article mentions.
Whether it's us or other startups, I agree with the article that in the next few years you'll see a trend towards more "Google for Law" -- companies will make legal research free, and their comparative advantage will be on their technology, often driven by ML/AI. As a lawyer/coder, it's a pretty exciting time to be in the space.
Oh yeah, and we're hiring! https://casetext.com/jobs
That is not the case when it comes to searching the world wide web. Here, by design, everything is linked and national borders are mostly irrelevant. So if you want to implement a Google of law, you have to do it locally. The only exception would be international law, which itself can be seen as local.
Other problems include official vs. unofficial laws, slow consolidations, updates to the law (of various kinds) and attempting to normalize the world's laws to a US standard (like excluding municipal laws and avoiding guidance-type documents from civil law countries). These are problems Google doesn't have to deal with and customers expect a very high standard for legal search results.
Just saw this posted to HN RSS feed by lever...
Maybe lever watches what's trending on HN and then puts job adverts? If so, NICE ;)
Become a Data Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer at Casetext https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13307644 https://jobs.lever.co/casetext/c7f0129e-af9b-461e-b791-a9323...
Machine learning is at the core of Casetext's mission to make the law free and understandable and we're looking for an ML engineer/data scientist to help us build the next generation of legal research products. The data team at Casetext is working on groundbreaking legal technology for document recommendation and search. If you have industry experience developing production software for machine learning, especially in areas like NLP, graph models, topic modeling, and/or recommendation engines, we'd love to talk to you.
I've argued a couple cases in district court (and one case is on the docket of the Supreme Court) and I've used a mix of law school textbooks, Scotusblog.com, Cornell's Legal Information Institute and lawyer's blogs to start background research.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docketfil...
Bylaws are hard to lookup and are city-specific.
My blog post on this topic: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ and https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/.
Eg. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsession...
It's probably made simpler by the fact that we are not a federation with law making bodies everywhere...
A good example of this is when a state or municipality enacts a building code. A common building code is the electrical code published by NFPA. Most states use this. NFPA owns the copyright for this. You cannot publish a PDF of the electrical code on your website, yet you are required by law to follow it.
There may be other cases of this, I don't know. But I think it is crazy!
It basically is "google for the law" (provided that your definition of law only extends to federal courts and state appeals courts). But they typically have full opinions available for free.
General summary: http://thelegalpioneer.blogspot.com/2014/02/plainsite-puttin...
> "However, most laws can only be searched using the dark-age, Lycos strategy—guess at keywords and hope—and it’s often necessary to pay for even that limited functionality."
I took a look at the Umsatzsteuer [Value Added Tax] part as I had to read it some years ago when I started freelancing: https://lawly.org/gesetz/UStG%201980/4.1#12-steuersaetze
The Inhaltsübersicht [content overview] list at the right side is yellow on white which makes it hard to read.
In comparison with the place where I've read the German law before, there seem to be surplus list elements in the HTML: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ustg_1980/BJNR119530979.h...
It's nice though that by registering I could download the content for off-line use. AFAIK gesetze-im-internet.de does not provide that.
Are there any other relevant differences between those two services?
It's a pretty cool utility to integrate sheparding, research and info from the online Lexis law database into the context of a document a lawyer/ para legal may already be working on.
*http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-sym...
Making it computerized does not seem like the correct course of action. Human judges and juries are needed to fully evaluate the context and pass judgment.
My personal preference would be to go toward a less rigid system of law, not one so rigid that computers could reliably enforce it.
There's already a huge amount of finagling by powerful individuals and groups in our government, they just have a lot of pomp and circumstance to try to cover it up. Removing some of the formalities makes flexibility more accessible.
Sure, you can spend the millions of dollars it takes to successfully lobby Congress if you're a big multinational corporation. If you're a niche concern, you're stuck.
Everyone hates mandatory minimum sentences these days. They were put in for a lot of drug crimes in the late 80s-early 90s, and they result in a lot of unneeded incarcerations, not only costing the taxpayer a lot of money, but costing society, family, and community the participation and productivity of someone who would be much more beneficial outside than in. Because of our rigid legal traditions, mandatory minimums must be enforced regardless of circumstances.
When you get down to the bottom of it, no matter what system of governance you have, you need its administrators to be benevolent and wise to get desirable outcomes. I believe that more local authorities are more able to make wise decisions because they not only know the area more intimately, but are more impacted by the outcomes. A far-off judge doesn't care if he sends 40% of the community to jail. A local judge does.
This is kind of like being entitled to being judged by a jury of your peers. Peers know the cultural norms and the local expectations. High-powered attorneys sitting on a bench in Washington, D.C. may not.
There's no (or little) money to be made doing it.
Maybe in the future when collecting and modeling such knowledge is cheap. For now, it's not cheap.
And it looks like AustLII was where it started; the WorldLII contacts are all AustLII people.
But lexis and westlaw are the tools needed for serious research.
source: my dad was a lawyer for 20+ years.
The _text_ of law alone is worthless. In very few cases you should search for keywords.
The unsolved problem is that what is needed (and there are private systems that can do this) is the ability to make queries like
In 2014
my only child was 17,
my family lived in Italy
but I worked most of my time in the UK;
which version of the Italian child-care law applied to me at the time?
1. Know all the text of all the acts out there at the Italian level, European level and supra-national level.
2. Find the main acts that deal with child-care law.
3. Find all the acts that modify those main acts (they could extend it duration, modify its content).
3b. Find all the acts that modify the acts that modify those main acts (maybe the extension has been repelled).
3c. Find all the acts that modify the acts that modify the acts that modify those main acts (I think the point is clear now)
4. Consolidate (merge) all these acts using the rules that were in place at the time of the enactment. This produces a tree of versions for each point in time, not just a single version.
5. Find all the judgments that reference any of these acts.
6. Highlight the points that have to do with the user query.
Truth be told, having the raw text (point 1) is the easiest part. The rest is what is extremely complicated. Regardless of this, there are private systems in places that can perform this kind of queries (although in a very limited fashion: their idea of "the whole corpus of law" is extremely narrow).
To make the life of implementers easier, markup formats like AkomaNtoso [2] or Oasis LegalDocumentML/LegalRuleML [3] are being used, sadly not enough.
Making the corpus of the law accessible is an important first step. But the corpus alone is is not going to be much helpful. It may even be dangerous if the single texts are not cross-referenced with other relevant texts.
Appeal to authority: I worked on versioning legal documents (bills, acts, judgments, etc) during my PhD. I also worked in the research group that shaped the early versions of AkomaNtoso.
[1] IT: http://normattiva.it (ex NormeInRete) DE: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de EU: http://eur-lex.europa.eu US-CA: http://legisweb.com
Plus, I just couldn't find anybody publicly using it. The EU parliament supposedly does, but they could never give me an answer why they weren't sharing it online (only .doc and .pdf).
I've met Monica Palmirani of Akoma Ntoso recently and she told me they have just launched a case law standard, and so they're still working on it. I'm actually amazed she hasn't burned out yet. Trying to get governments to play nice data-wise is i n c r e d i b l y hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECLI http://bo-ecli.eu/
Dutch law and government publications are available as XML and ODF.
The constitution: http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001840/2008-07-15
A publication about standards: https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/stcrt-2015-39782.htm...
Each article can be linked and documents referring to each article can be found as well.
For example all known documents that link to article 5 (equality) of the constitution:
http://linkeddata.overheid.nl/embedded/portal/spiegel-lijstw...
The links are available as RDF.
Currently work is underway to publish law as XML and RDF with ODF/PDF/HTML as secondary formats. This will allow embedding of data such as property lines, lists of medicines, reusable financial reports.