Comment by damncabbage
13 years ago
There was a great discussion on HN previously about this topic which also explains why a straight git implementation isn't viable for US law; I'm not sure if doing the same with Germany's laws would be similarly difficult:
As discussed in the linked HN discussion, VCS/diffs are not compatible with the established workflow for discussing and changing laws. However, as far as I understand, this repository is not primarily intended as a tool for supporting lawmakers but serves two purposes:
a) It allows the public to track all changes made to a law.
b) it allows NGOs and other parties to suggest changes to a law by forking the repo and sending a pull request. [1]
In summary: no revolutionary shift but a nice tool.
[1] https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/pull/2/files
This is about as revolutionary as officially letting the plebs read the bible.
Pretty damn revolutionary.
Anyone can already read the laws, though. I'm less sure that reading them specifically via git is a major revolution. it's possible something compelling will be built on top of it, I'll admit.
For the U.S. code, something like Cornell's LII interface, which for a long time has displayed both the current version of the law and, for any section, the history of amendments to that section, seems more user-friendly than a git repo: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text
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Thanks for the link. I read the following from that earlier discussion and immediately thought, isn't this what the Darcs version control system was designed to do?
"What you have to do is to just record the conflict and create two parallel universes, one in which the conflict has been resolved using branch A and another one in which the conflict is resolved using branch B. You then keep these two universes alive and apply all the later changes twice. You have to do this until a judge or a legal body declares one of the "branches" the correct one; this may take years and the decision reverted (even partially) many times."
Normaly you work out consequetials so if amedment to a law a and amadement b contradict if amendement a is passed then b is deemed to have been defeated.
Isn't US law not public-domain anyway? Or at least on a state by state basis? I remember a copyright issue concerning someone reprinting some of Oregon's laws.
The law is non-copyrightable. However a lot of state laws say "You will build your building according to Document X by Corporation Y" and that is copyrighted and not given out without a lot of money. The reason why these exist is that lawmakers aren't experts in, say, concrete; and those who are tend to be employed privately, and make industrial standards. As an example consider specifying that a program will be written in C (a bad idea here, but saying "structural members for buildings shall be steel as defined by this standard" isn't a terrible idea). C is defined by the relevant ANSI or ISO standard; now if you want to know what the law actually says, you have to pony up the money for an official standard.
I don't know what settled law is about this, but it is at the least morally questionable activity.
The law is fairly settled, however the Supremes have not said anything on the matter yet. The Veeck decision is the best answer as of now and Veeck seems to be pretty clear:
"The issue in this en banc case is the extent to which a private organization may assert copyright protection for its model codes, after the models have been adopted by a legislative body and become "the law". Specifically, may a code-writing organization prevent a website operator from posting the text of a model code where the code is identified simply as the building code of a city that enacted the model code as law? Our short answer is that as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder's exclusive prerogatives." (Veeck v. SOUTHERN BLDG. CODE CONGRESS INTERN., 293 F. 3d 791 - Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit 2002)[1]
You do not need to pony up the money if Carl Malamud already has a copy of the code. If you have purchased one of these codes and are done with the hardcopy get in touch with Malamud and see if he wants it.
Cory Doctorow explains Carl Malamud's efforts after the Veeck decision: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/liberating-americas-secret....
May god continue to bless Mr. Malamud and all of the great work he has done...
[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6755260615473645...
The scary consequence could be that eventually there will be laws prescribing certain programming techniques for software projects.
In Germany I think it is almost already the case, because if your software project goes awry, the judge will want to know that used current best practices of software development. I only picked that up in passing, though, reading about a case with another focus. But it scares me, because I don't necessarily agree with all current "best practices". Imagine being sued because you didn't include 99% test coverage. Or worse, because you didn't use Java.
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That doesn't make any sense. How can laws not be in the public domain? Can any lawyers around comment?
IANAL but you are right from the basic premise:
“If a Law Isn't Public, It Isn't a Law”—Justice Stephen Breyer
But I believe the distinction here is that just because the law is public, that doesn't mean that you can call up anyone who has a copy of the law (including the organization who wrote the law) and say "Hey, give me a copy of the law."
So orgs like Malamud's get copies of the law and provide them freely to all:
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/liberating-americas-secret....
Merges definitely seem like they'd be difficult if there are two concurrent changes to a statute, but that's always going to be the case (and is the case with or without source control).
I think a lot of the initial focus/discussion here is about machine-readable interpretation and management of laws themselves, and hence the challenges of turning gray into black and white - but I think that having a historical, digital record of changes in laws -- especially if clear attributions to individuals or groups can be made -- could be just as significant, if not more so.
Imagine having a full historical record of legal changes across and within a nation, and the data measurements to back up the effects of those changes. The results could be linked back to the individuals/groups involved in drafting the laws - data-based legal review.
Since Germany has a civil law instead of a common law system, this might be easier. (But I don't know, really.)
Not really. Common law systems still have statutes that are compiled and amended. The "common law" potion of the system just means that court rulings are (potentially) binding upon other courts.
The difference between civil and common law is an elusive thing. On the surface it is enormous, but the deeper you dig, the less you find.
Sometimes it's claimed it's about precedent, and indeed some civil law jurisdictions claim that they do not believe in binding precedent. But of course for a legal system to be at all useful, decisions need to be consistent, and the idea that you can achieve consistency by writing every detail in a code so that every decision logically follows from the code is bullshit; if that were the case, all civil lawsuits would be 100% predictable and therefore rational actors would settle them and the judges could all go on vacation.
The reasoning I once read in some Dutch first-year law course notes was along the lines of "we don't do _stare decisis_, but we support equal treatment in equal cases, and it would be unequal treatment to treat you in way X when we treated the other guy in way Y, so we're going to follow precedent, but not because we must follow precedent, but only to avoid unequal treatment." I suppose that it is true that digging up absolutely ancient judgments is a little bit less convincing in a civil law setting, especially if there are periodic recodifications so that you can simply toss away a 17th-century precedent by saying it was an interpretation of the old code, not the new one.
Some say the difference is codification, but as you point out, not all status in common law jurisdictions are just piles of unrelated acts: a lot of the time, they are organized as systematic codes that are amended just like civil law codes. And besides, civil law countries have uncodified case law, too. The section on torts in the French civil code, for instance, is incredibly terse, saying basically that if you unfairly harm somebody you must compensate them. But of course France has tort law just like England does. Interestingly, since French court decisions do not normally provide much reasoning aside from quoting sections of the codes, the details of that tort law get elaborated mostly by law professors in books and articles; but in other civil law jurisdictions, like Germany, judges write long, reasoned decisions just like in the US (except more stilted and formulaic in style). And Scotland, considered traditionally a civil law country, has lots of English-style uncodified legislation.
So maybe then it's the Roman basis? Nah. English law had lots of Roman influence, too, and continental law had lots of influence from local customary law, canon law, and the law merchant. (Just read Berman to find out the details.) Maybe the continentals were bigger on pretending that it was all Codex Iuris Civilis all the time, but nobody ever really believed that.
So then what? Sometimes you hear particular doctrines called out as being significantly different, like consideration in in common contract law as opposed to the intention to be bound in the civil law of obligations. But the consideration rule has so many exceptions that if you can reasonably be thought to have intended to be bound, you'd better know the law very precisely if you still want to get out from under things based on lack of consideration. Besides, consideration may not be required in the civil law, but a payment can serve as evidence of a nonwritten contract.
That's not to say that there are no differences, but it's hard to pin down anything that really applies in all civil law jurisdictions and no common law jurisdictions or vice versa. Notaries, I think, are a pretty consistent difference, although they don't exist in some Asian civil-law jurisdictions.