dgreisen

Regularization and refactoring is actually an integral part of most legal systems. Most jurisdictions in the US go through periodic (1-5 decade) "recodifications" of their law, where the code is reorganized to clean up all the path dependencies of the organically grown law. Restatements do something similar for common law (although they are arguably becoming less influential). Non-US jurisdictions often accomplish this by periodically repealing and replacing laws in their entirety.

This is very cool, and exceptionally well-thought-out. I particularly like how they are working with the existing legal/legislative institutions to fix the issues at their source rather than creating yet another unofficial version.

We've built the Open Law Platform that governments can use to do this with their official laws. We just launched with the Maryland Secretary of State last month at regs.maryland.gov. You can see the "source code" at https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-xml, and the "compiled" code at any point in time since they started using our system at https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-xml-codified and https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-html. All cryptographically signed at https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law.

Our nonprofit, Open Law Library, is working on this exact problem. It is definitely not trivial, but it is very doable. We partner directly with governments to help them implement so the git repos become the canonical record (rather than just an unofficial mirror).

Maryland just launched their regs on our platform:

https://regs.maryland.gov (https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-xml-codified)

Feel free to reach out (email in bio) if you would like your community to publish their official laws on GitHub!

SEEKING FREELANCER | DC | Remote

DC Refers is a non-profit that helps people of modest means (200-400% poverty line) find affordable legal representation.

We've built out a custom Django app at dcrefers.org.

We are looking for a freelancer for 3-6 months to help us open source the website and build out new functionality including better reporting, OpenAI integrations, and easier customization by non-technical staff.

If interested, please email me at dgreisen@dcrefers.org with `[dev]` in the subject line.

It's fun seeing information science applied to different domains. This is very similar to the system that we've converged on over the last 100 years for legal codes with title.chapter.section (see, e.g., https://law.cityofsanmateo.org/us/ca/cities/san-mateo/code/8...). The ability with the system to unambiguously and _succinctly_ cite to a particular part of the law (or, in this case, the filesystem) is a game changer.

SEEKING FREELANCER | Washington, DC, fully remote

We are looking for a part-time (20-40hrs/mo) contractor to support our open source PyGLS (the Python Generic Language Server, https://github.com/openlawlibrary/pygls/) and the community that has grown around it.

Contractor must have strong python skills and experience managing/supporting open source projects.

Open Law Library is a nonprofit tech startup and open access legal publisher dedicated to securing digital law and making it accessible to all.

If you are interested, or know someone who might be, please reach out to me directly at dgreisen@openlawlib.org.

SEEKING FREELANCER | DC | remote

DC Refers is a non-profit that helps people of modest means (200-400% poverty line) find affordable legal representation.

We are looking for a freelancer to help us build our referral system in Django.

Email me at dgreisen@dcrefers.org if interested.

Open Law Library | Full Stack Python/Javascript/C# | Remote for Ukraine & Ukrainian Refugees | flexible hours

Open Law Library is a nonprofit tech startup and open access legal publisher dedicated to securing digital law and making it accessible to all.

If you are looking for a meaningful way to contribute to democracy, you find joy in building the perfect tools for your users, you like deep and challenging problems in such diverse areas as version control, DSL design, UI/UX, and NLP (more accurately, LLP - Legal Language Processing :), and the idea of helping build a team excites you, then we might be a good fit!

We are currently a team of 8 spread across the US and Europe, and we have received donations specifically earmarked to bring on two Ukrainian developers. English is a requirement. We understand the need for flexibility, and so are committed to working with you to ensure your time with us is a success.

If you are interested, or know someone who might be, please reach out to me directly at dgreisen@openlawlib.org.

We've been thinking about that, and decided to err on the side of too lax than too stringent for exactly this reason. Wires to Ukrainian bank would be strong evidence. Red Cross paperwork or refugee visa also seems good enough. Honestly, we're considering simply a signed affidavit (notary paid for by us).

That is good to know. Unfortunately, we do not have any existing relationships.

Our nonprofit, Open Law Library, works with governments to do exactly this. For example, the DC Council uses our software to codify and publish their laws in xml and html on github: https://github.com/dccouncil/dc-law-xml. If you're interested in getting your government's laws published using git in human- and computer-readable formats, feel free to reach out to me at dgreisen [at] openlawlib [dot] org.

Open Law Library | REMOTE in USA | Head of Sales and Growth

Open Law Library is a technology-driven nonprofit that is building the foundational government infrastructure for the next 50 years to improve policy, citizen engagement, and government. We develop cutting-edge software that converts the daily deluge of government legal documents into clean and useable legal data in real-time. Governments use our comprehensive software platform to draft, codify, and publish cryptographically-secure laws to ensure preservation, authentication, and access for generations to come. Our open-access publishing platform assures published laws are freely accessible, aligning our interests with those of our government partners and their citizens.

The successful Head of Sales and Growth candidate will report to the CEO and will focus on new sales opportunity creation and execution. Our clients range from small towns to cities, counties, states, and native American tribes. You will be responsible for proactive outreach beginning with lead generation and continuing through all phases of the sales process culminating in sale win/close. As our first sales hire, you will shape our entire sales process and, as we grow, you will have the opportunity to build out our entire sales team.

Full job posting, requirements, and application instructions: http://www.openlawlib.org/careers/

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 a number of technical limitations to gpg signatures. Your hypothetical attacker who has access to github can simply add his/her key and show up as a verified committer. gpg signatures have many other issues including metadata corruption, not to mention the nearly insurmountable issues around key management. As mentioned below, we have internal systems that allow us to audit/authenticate the repository. We will be rolling out a UELMA-compliant authentication scheme based on TUF in the next several months that will allow the public to authenticate the repository.

It is. Ping me at dgreisen (at) openlawlib.org if you're interested in helping out.

We have internal systems that allow us to audit/authenticate the repository. We will be deploying a cryptographic authentication framework based on TUF in Q1 2019 that will make it possible for _anybody_ to audit/authenticate the repository.

We are in talks with several international governments. We would be delighted to help your country!

The system does not in any way change the legislative process, so you cannot use a pull request to make any substantive change to the law. That would include rewording, changing punctuation, fixing numbering, etc. If such a pull request were made, it would be immediately closed. As throughout history, the only way to make a substantive change to the law is to petition your representative to sponsor a bill and then convince the legislature to pass it.

Even if the canonical copy were hosted on the Council's website, you would still be trusting the hosting provider, the DNS system, and the certificate authority - all private entities.

What is needed is cryptographic authentication so that the git servers can be completely untrusted. This is also necessary to comply with the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (adopted by DC here: https://code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/titles/2/chapters/...). We will be rolling out such a system based on TUF in Q1 2019.

As with most things in the law, it is complicated. The District legislative process shares many similarities to the federal government's. They pass laws, which are the official representation of the will of the Council. These laws are kinda like hand-crafted change sets. Change sets that can change other change sets.

These change sets are almost impossible to use as they are, so the Council creates an official compilation of all the change sets as applied and organized by subject. This is the Code of the District of Columbia. Usually, when people think about "the law" they are thinking about the code, because that is how people interact with it.

The laws as passed by the Council cannot (and should not) be changed via pull request. Here, the useful representation of those laws, the representation used by everybody who actually interacts with the law, has been updated via PR to more perfectly reflect the underlying laws.

Hi all, I'm a co-founder of Open Law Library, the non-profit that built the platform DC uses to codify and publish their laws. We were so excited when we saw a member of the public make a PR. I'm happy to answer any questions.

This is one of the tools we are building at Open Law Library. Open Law Draft is a linter that finds common errors in draft bills right in Word as they are being drafted. Fixing the error before the bill becomes law is much easier than having to pass another law to fix it. Extending the analogy, Open Law Codify is essentially our compiler. We will be integrating the two so we can find more complex errors at the drafting stage rather than having to wait for the codification stage, as we do now.

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.

There are several places where I strongly believe that access to the law can meaningfully improve access to justice. And I hope, through our work at Open Law Library, we can show this to be true.

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.

Another co-founder of Open Law Library, here. This is precisely what we are doing - building a patch-based xml database of the law. However, we are building a general tool that can work with the vast majority of state and local jurisdictions.

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.

Open Law Library | JS/Python dev; C# lead dev | openlawlib.org | U.S. REMOTE | $80-130k

Open Law Library is a small nonprofit tech startup and open access legal publisher dedicated to making the law accessible to all.

We are taking the tools and techniques developed for programmers to publish software code - IDEs, linters, compilers, continuous integration/deployment, VCS, etc - and adapting and transforming them for use by lawyers to publish legal codes. Governments use our tools to save time and money and then publish their laws openly for the public.

The founders are two lawyer/programmers (Scala, Python, and Javascript). Our funding is a mix of donations, grants, and government contracts.

If you are looking for a meaningful way to contribute to our democracy, you find joy in building the perfect tools for your users, you like deep and challenging problems in such diverse areas as version control, DSL design, UI/UX, and NLP (more accurately, LLP - Legal Language Processing :), and the idea of helping build a team excites you, then drop me a line at dgreisen@openlawlib.org.

* C# Lead Developer: Government lawyers live and breath MS Office, so our tools must integrate seamlessly with their MS-centric workflows. We are looking to hire a C# lead to help us build out our Microsoft team.

* Javascript/Python Developer: Our development environment for editing and publishing legal documents is based on the Atom editor. You will be integrating Atom with our existing Python backend and building all new tools, either in Atom plugins or in our Python backend, as appropriate.

The key sentence:

We are like a thirsty town, desperate for a new water supply.

Our human inclination is to talk ourselves into believing the mirage. Add in the inevitable snake oil salesmen... As scientists, the more we desperately, wish for a thing to be true, the more we must demand of the evidence.