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Comment by gammateam | Hacker News Reader

I've been wanting this for a long time, I wanted to take it further though:

I want draft laws, I want to see all representatives as contributors and be able to see their contributions and changes to draft laws.

the House should have a master branch that submits pull requests to another repository, the other chamber having one too

The Governor/President gets to approve PR's from that jurisdiction

It would become SUPER easy to track origins and changes of laws, let alone browse them, and comment on them.

I'd like to see this done retroactively all the way back to English law

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Here is an example of a platform like what you describe if not exactly, for the Delaware legislature.

I am linking to a particular law I followed from inception to passage, an amendment to the Delaware limited liability company Act allowing company records to be kept on Blockchain.

https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail/26554

You get the name of the Sponsor and co sponsors, additional sponsors, sign status, next steps, committee reports, action history, etc...

Existing platforms have limitations

My main problem is that many laws are written as: “Hereby strikes section b of USC1788(1)(iii) and replaced the word or with and”

And with this kind of system it would be standardized already on how to see what the modifications look like, or at least jump to that old version of the law easily

When the final laws are all merged together after a passed bill makes simple instructions instead of the plain text law, it would be easy to see the version history of that section of the law, or act

Yep. Like in the Delaware URL posted by GP, in the first few lines we see, "This section amends Section 18-101..." which is not linked. I don't know if this platform allows one to link to a specific version of a law, but it would seem like a logical next step to help it happen one way or another. A lot of it is probably automatable.

Oh thats too perfect

Thanks! All the other comments have been “hey the system you described has been around for many years, with all the problems you described but I didnt notice those just going to make a rebuttal to your idea for rebuttal’s sake”

I wonder how much this could be genericized to all (or most, or even some) states, let alone the US Code, regulations, etc. Actually, state formats and whatnot could be plugins or compilation switches.

I've actually thought about this for some years, but idly, and I haven't found the time yet to get started. It just seems like an excellent and obvious-to-me use for HTML.

The California legislature has this feature - the default landing page gives you that legal diff format, but if you hit the "Today's Law as Amended" tab you get a handy word-oriented diff: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...

Nice! I would like to move the goal post a BIT further, and also have annotations of case law that actually used any of those clauses.

So the bill I linked to includes a link to a PDF of the original bill which passed, if on the other hand there were changes you would see a pdf for each version of the bill.

Florida has a search function for their statutes that allows you to then select the year/version of the law. If the Law was amended in a given year in the annotations there are “redline versions” of the law pre amendment, with changes and final.

So again similar to what you describe but as you say...limitations to existing systems. Obviously standardization is also another problem, it would be hard enough to work with federal code and 50 states but the reality is each county and city/municipality can have their own bodies of laws, rules, regulations and ordinances...so thousands of bodies of law, in the US alone.

I'm very much in favor of leveraging the advantages of version control software for legal text. Git seems perfect for this, but GitHub is a terrible choice to host it. Surely we don't want a large corporation owning the platform on which our laws are enshrined. It seems like it would be much better for this to be self-hosted.

Github does not own git, it only owns the UI that they've built on top of it. You can simply clone the repo and take it somewhere else and you can find an open source UI replacement to put on top too (e.g. Gitlab).

Github is free to use for open source projects, self-hosting by the government would only make it more expensive for the tax payer.

> Github ... owns the UI that they've built on top of it

That's the problem though. In principal, if they only use pure-git operations in the process, it would be easy to move at any point. But if they leverage the entire Github platform, i.e. PR discussion, issue tracking etc, then important parts of the legal history will be bound to the github platform.

And that's not great. Github is free for public projects for now, but as with any publicly traded tech company, they're able to change the terms of use of their product at any time to suit the needs of the company.

When we're talking about enshrining the laws of society, we're talking about a very long-term proposition. Technology companies pivot and or kill products all the time. What if we decided to record legislative history on Google Flow?

We take long-term access to the law very seriously. For the reasons you give, we rely only on native git operations. PRs are a convenient interface, nothing more.

There are technical solutions that could be used here. You can JSON dump the PR contents and Issue contents, for example, into another repository (or a branch in the same repository). It wouldn't be hard to automate that process with the GitHub API.

That doesn't solve the interop problem that would exist in trying to implement secondary UI systems that can redisplay that information usefully, but ETL of that sort is full of options and developers with experience.

JSON dumps of GitHub information would be useful to more open source projects beyond legislative history. I think a good automated solution could be generally useful, if someone wanted to invest in it.

What stops GitHub from banning certain IPs from accessing their service?

Presumably a federal government contract can have these clauses built-in.

They also have self-hosted enterprise contracts so I'm sure something like that could be done if the government were interested.

Git is decentralized so it doesn't really matter where it's hosted. Github works since it's free, but everyone who checks out the source will have the full git history and so also becomes another repository. Easy to move a git repo to somewhere else.

While this can be argued to be true of git in a technical sense, virtually all git projects in practice have a central source of truth repository. GitHub’s entire business model is largely predicated on the fact projects will use it as their primary repository.

If we are talking about accepting PRs for drafting legislation in git, where it is hosted and who hosts it becomes extremely important. Sure anyone can clone/fork, but only the appointed central repo could become law. A clone that you or I make will likely never have this ability.

Yes, need to agree on a central place to push/pull and create PRs from. But my point is that right now people are using GitHub but if any point they want to change, or GitHub go down (or change licensing etc), they aren't beholden to them. Just push the git repository to somewhere else and agree to that. Other developers would confirm the git repo is the same.

They have what you describe, and moreover such a thing has existed in paper form since th this country was formed.

Real time access to laws as they are drafted is a Really Bad Idea. Good ideas need time to incubate. The system you want would lead to the sound byte version of legislating.

I actually really like the idea of a set of code branches like the Linux kernel has. Different groups would have their own branches and when they reach something worthy of actually considering 'outside of comity' (their still published but clearly development branch) submit a patch to a staging (discussion) branch which will then hammer things out and get feedback / analysis that leads to a version that is actually voted on.

I can just imagine shitty news websites exploding over someones draft/brainstorm and hyper criticism of unfinished work.

This is why the Constitution was drafted behind closed doors. The contributors needed room to have dumb ideas.

using git doesnt make it a realtime system

Only a better system

C-SPAN already exists for “sound byte legislating.”

Plus, fine-grained version control doesn’t imply real time updates. It’s fully possible to only release the version history to the public after the law is approved.

Then the first draft can go out when it would have been normally published. Then, the main value add would be commenting and suggesting changes as well as a centralized place to see comments and suggestions as well as their reactions.

> Real time access to laws as they are drafted is a Really Bad Idea. Good ideas need time to incubate.

Good point, but if they used a distributed version control system, lawmakers could have any number of private repositories on which to craft laws before they're merged to the public master repo.

(I wouldn't expect lawmakers themselves to use git, of course; their staff would do this for them.)

I would love to see a constitution drafted for a fictional country.

Our better still, a fictional Constitution for all humans on Earth.

Good luck with that. There are too many belief sets, even for things like basic freedoms, for everyone to fall under a single law effectively.

Any effort to do so will lead to tyranny.

I think you've missed a key word in the comment you're replying on: fictional Constitution.

It's just a process that would lead to some interesting outcome. Nobody's suggesting anything about enforcing that outcome to anyone.

Oh. Fair enough.

You might enjoy reading about constitutions being drafted for real countries - https://www.npr.org/2011/02/10/133657355/The-Nuts-And-Bolts-...

Not a constitution, but I did a little something like this for the Declaration of Independence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021461

I agree but politicians shouldn't be the contributors. Representatives don't actually write the laws. I'd like to see the name of the staffer or lobbyist who wrote the text. Also, it should be a federal crime to falsify the name of the author or make changes for someone else.

Lobbyists would need the ability to write/amend laws or the current system of graft wouldn't work.

I.e., your design if not bug-compatible will be rejected.

I would like to see who wrote the text AND who submitted it. As in the lobbyist who wrote the text AND the politician who submitted it...

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