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Comment by CodeWriter23 | Hacker News Reader

I’m personally not OK with a system that enables a single individual (the "lawyer" in the article) to declare modification to a law as insubstantial, then modify the law.

Some review process needs to be there, and frankly, even a typo correction IMO needs to be run by the Mayor because she/he signed one thing into law and this process changes what they signed. We cannot ever assume we know the intent of the Chief Executive, even when “obviously” in error.

OTOH, a diff system for law is awesome. California uses a similar system but it is cumbersome to do things like “show me how this section evolved over time”.

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> and this process changes what they signed

The mayor didn't sign a website.

The author clearly indicates the website did not accurately reflect the act as enacted at the very beginning of the article: "Comparing the DC Code to the act that made the change, I noticed that something was amiss..."

Perhaps you should read the article.

> This sort of “technical correction,” as lawyers would call it, didn’t need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor.

Judging from screenshots, the person who accepted the change was on the DC City Council.

Still, not the Mayor. And, did it unilaterally, inviting abuse.

If you want to abuse the law doing so in a public ledger that anyone accessing has a copy of (such that just reverting commits on github doesn't remove from them everyones histories) seems like a really unwise way of going about it.

Whats important is having eyes on what changes are made, and if you want to track changes and revisions to something... github (and gitlab, phabricator, etc) is pretty close to the optimization of that problem humanity has developed up to this point.

No law was changed. The title is straight up clickbait.

Actually, it was changed. A reference from "Subchapter I" was changed to "Subchapter II", under the authority of the single lawyer that reviewed it.

Here's the original pull request: https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-xml/pull/134/files

The text already mentioned "The Freedom of Information Act of 1976" unambiguously, but the metadata was incorrect.

There was a review performed via pull request. In this case,a small typo was corrected - no further action required.

Yes, in this case, no harm done. But the process of checks and balances that are the backbone of our system of government were circumvented. Those checks and balances exist to create a hope of detecting abuse when it happens.

Is is possible that a similarly light-weight process would have been used if the correction had been submitted in a typewritten letter or over email?

Indeed. Even something as small as an added comma might seem a good idea but could drastically change the reading of the law in question.

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