Comment by tpmoney
6 hours ago
Something akin to this is a big part of the products that companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters charge your lawyers a whole lot of money for. Because for a lot of legal questions, you don't just need to know what the law says now, but what it said at the time of the incident in question. And every legislative body around the country (at least at the time I was working in this space a decade ago) publishes legislative changes in completely different and often times not easily parsable forms. Web scraping and PDF scraping was far more common than you'd think. Some state legislatures published changes in more reasonable forms, and some states contract their official legislative compilation to companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters and work to publish an actual change stream with proper standardized references. There's a lot of manual work that goes into making stuff like this work, a lot of lawyers and other legal professionals manually reviewing that the right pieces were removed or added in the right places, matching up references to parts of the law that might have changed between the time the legislation was passed and the time the change was published and figuring out what order everything actually goes in. And the actual text of the law is only part of the equation. Legal decisions from courts can dramatically impact the reading of the law, or effect effectively strike laws from the books (even if the laws are technically still on the books, just not enforceable). So often the right way to represent a diff of two points in time depends on the question you're trying to answer.
I wanted to do something like this for a single section in Washington law, to show why a particular funding restriction had been added, but was no longer achieving the intended goal. Git alone wasn't enough of a UI, because the 'why' was only in the introductory text of the bill that changed the law, and not in the law itself - and then there was the move of that article to a different section, and a re-numbering of sections, and a change in definition in a different section that affected the scope of this one... fascinating stuff!
I thought legal document versioning software would cover some of these problems but it doesn't seem like a similar enough process.
Following renumbers has to be one of the worst parts of this. As an example, the text of the US code that was modified by the BCRA in 2002 has been renumbered / moved since Citizens United v FEC was decided. But the text itself is the same as it was since the BCRA passed, because courts don't remove the actual law text with their decisions. So if you want to know what parts of the current US code were ruled unconstitutional by the courts in that decision and are therefore unenforceable, you need to first find the text of the BCRA, because the ruling refers to the sections of that piece of legislation. Then you need to find the version of the US code that was on the books when the BCRA was passed to find the section references that the law talks about. Then you need to find the law that renumbered that part of the US Code and find the new parts. Then you need to see if any changes have been applied since (there hasn't really) and then you need to match the changes to the referenced sections in the old version of the code to the equivalent text in the current version of the code, modulo any changes to references that changed as part of the renumbering but are otherwise the same.
I'm not saying lawyers aren't really really expensive, but you don't have to spend a long time digging into just a simple question like "what parts of the law are no longer enforceable after a supreme court decision" before you start to understand why they charge the prices they do.