Hacker News Reader

Comment by shicholas | Hacker News Reader

Also the states themselves can’t update their own laws. In Nevada the code (NRS) from Nevada’s website is out of date. Very embarrassing imo and hard to get it to work bc AI can’t have a trusted source of data.

View on HN

Why can't Nevada update its own laws on its own website?

The answer is probaly embedded within the concept of codification of acts. Legislatures pass acts, which are kind of like diffs for statutory law. But there is no base document, just a series of diffs from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, someone did a lot of work to “codify” the law, and when you go look up 18 USC 1001, and then click “next,” you are taking advantage of the codification process.

But the person who did the codification has some rights thereto, meaning that while NV can post every act that passed the legislature, they can’t publish someone else’s codification of the statutes.

This matters very little because everyone just has Westlaw and no one uses the state legislature’s website to cite statutes.

I would argue it does matter because the public has to know all the law as ignorance of the law is no excuse. If Westlaw is limited or an unreasonable monetary burden on the populace (or possibly, depending on your argument, costs anything at all) then the argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.

IMO, this should also extend to opinions -- if there is precedent that guides what the law is, it needs to be publicly published free of charge so that the public is put under notice what the law is. (someone might mention something like PACER is free in small quantities, I would counter it would cost you a gazillion dollars to be fully informed of all the precedent that forms the full common law meaning of the laws.) This is especially important in mala prohibita crimes since there's no way to even guess through moral/ethical deduction.

> argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.

I reckon that’s why the sixth amendment exists but if you want to make a free PACER, go for it.

The codification needs to become part of the process of passing acts. The government should be required to publish the updated code themselves along with any act that changed it. The whole concept that a commercial entity can have rights to the fully assembled text is terribly broken.

If anybody is worried about the jobs those businesses created, then tell them to pivot into publishing commented editions of the codes (add cross-references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.).

The codification happened hundreds of years ago, though.

But you could do it too! The Congressional Record is a thing, and it publishes all the acts of Congress, all the way back to the beginning.

The problem is that after you were done, the first thing someone would ask you is to cross-cite everything into the West Annotated code because no one else has your code and no one cares about it, because we all have Westlaw.

(Which publishes commented editions of the codes, with cross references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.)

It's all a little bit antiquated but it works fine. Someday it will change. I too thought it should work the way people are describing upthread when I was a computer guy but it is what it is.

So are Nevada lawmakers using Westlaw as there reference for the base document to build "edits" off of?

I would imagine you either start with the first acts of your legislature and codify it from the beginning, or you start with some version of the code you figure you have rights to and go from there. It seems like it would be insane to do that job halfway, but that's not my area of expertise.

I have no idea whatsoever what is going on in Nevada.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com