Comment by DannyBee

At least in the US, a lot of the laws that get passed are in the form of diffs.

That is, the law that they enact says "This law is to do blah blah blah.

Subsection 1373(a) of the US code is replaced with the following text 'blah blah blah'"

The wording used is pretty standard. So you can actually parse it in most cases to see what the actual changes are.