Bruce on GitLaw

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted GitHub: It Ain’t Magic Pixie Dust, at his blog, b-screeds.

Here are excerpts:

These days, people are sticking legislation into GitHub at a furious pace. It is all the rage among the legal-information smart set. [...]

Trouble is, I’m not so just in love with gittification as everybody else seems to be. Here’s why:

Git and GitHub are, collectively, a fine revision-control system, and a good system for distributing and managing open-source coding efforts like the ones at
https://github.com/unitedstates
. Unfortunately, straightforward revision and versioning are not really what happens with most legislation hereabouts. American Federal legislation is not a straightforward revision process at all. That is especially so when post-hoc codification results in an issue-centric bill being splattered all over the topical map of the US Code. Other jurisdictions — notably civil-law countries — at least pretend to have a more rational process for legislative revision, though I am told that in practice it is not so pretty as all that. They are, by and large, having some success with FRBR-based models which closely resemble revisions control, but for a number of reasons those don’t work as well as they might for Federal legislation. Simple processes in which a single version of text is successively modified and the modifications absorbed into a series of versions and branches are not quite enough to map the eddies and backwaters of our process, in which multiple competing drafts of a bill can exist at the same time, bills can be reintroduced in later sessions, and so on.

I am far from the first person to make this point. Others have done so very effectively right along, but the story does not end there. The beauties of revision management do not explain why we are hearing so much git-love. There must be more to be just in love with than the idea that you might keep track of changes in the language of a bill.

I think there are three pieces to it, really. One is the idea that somehow the gittification paradigm describes what the system *ought* to be, and represents the aspirations of its proponents; one is the idea that putting law in github somehow magically puts ownership of the law where it belongs; and one is the idea that gittification is somehow democratizing. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for other recent posts about GitLaw.

White House publishes Open Data Policy memorandum on GitHub, enabling eParticipation

Among the interesting features of the White House’s new Open Data Policy is that the memorandum that provides policy guidance to agencies in complying with the policy (M-13-13) was published on GitHub, using GitHub’s “Pages” service — see the White House’s Project Open Data GitHub page.

Publishing the memorandum on GitHub allows citizens to propose revisions to the policy, through GitHub’s “commit” and “pull request” functions.

The White House’s publishing choice thus enables citizen participation in the process of crafting the government’s open data policy.

Nick Judd at TechPresident reports that developers have already begun to submit revisions to the policy on GitHub.

GitHub’s Ben Balter comments on this use of GitHub to enable citizen participation in policy making: The Revolution Will Be Forked.

HT Alan deLevie

Kuhlman: legal-markdown Ruby gem

Casey Kuhlman, Esq., of Watershed Legal Services has posted legal-markdown to GitHub.

Here are excerpts from the readme:

This gem was built specifically to empower the creation of structured legal documents using markdown, and a markdown renderer. This gem acts as a middle layer by providing the user with structured headers and mixins that will greatly empower the use of md to create and maintain structured legal documents. [...]

This gem will parse YAML Front Matter of Markdown Documents. Typically, this gem would be called with a md renderer, such as Pandoc, that would turn the md into a document such as a .pdf file or a .docx file. By combining this pre-processing with a markdown renderer, you can ensure that both the structured content and the structured styles necessary for your firm or organization are more strictly enforced. Plus you won’t have to deal with Word any longer [...]

Gitlaw is markdown agnostic at this point and needs to be called independently of any markdown renderer. It is easy enough to build it into your work flow by editing the way that your markdown renderer is called. For instance you can call this file just before pandoc builds it. [...]

For more details, please see the complete documentation.

Related repositories are at
https://github.com/compleatang/
, including Legal-Snippets-Sublime and Legal-Markdown-Sublime.

The idea of using Markdown to edit legal documents has been raised in the context of the GitLaw discussion.

HT @BenBalter

Mill: Sunlight Foundation releases Congress API

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation points us to Sunlight Congress API released yesterday.

Here is a description:

A live JSON API for the people and work of Congress, provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

Features

Lots of features and data for members of Congress:

• Look up legislators by location or by zip code.
• Official Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
• Committees and subcommittees in Congress, including memberships and rankings.

We also provide Congress’ daily work:

• All introduced bills in the House and Senate, and what occurs to them (updated daily).
• Full text search over bills, with powerful Lucene-based query syntax.
• Real time notice of votes, floor activity, and committee hearings, and when bills are scheduled for debate.

All data is served in JSON, and requires a Sunlight API key. An API key is free to register and has no usage limits.

We have an API mailing list, and can be found on Twitter at @sunlightlabs. Bugs and feature requests can be made on Github Issues. [...]

About the source of the bill data, Eric says:

it’s built on the github.com/unitedstates work that GovTrack and Sunlight and others created, which ultimately comes from THOMAS.

He adds:

there’s a mix of other (documented) official sources too. One of the API’s purposes is to connect and de-silo information.

For more details, please see the Sunlight Congress API site.

For more information on the github.com/unitedstates repository, which was co-developed by Eric, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, please see the post entitled New Congressional Data Available for Free Bulk Download: Bill Data 1973- , Members 1789-

HT @konklone

New Zealand statutes on GitHub

I just learned that developer Brenda Wallace has posted many New Zealand statutes to GitHub.

The statutes appear to have been posted in 2010, and it’s unclear whether they have been updated since.

This repository is another example of GitLaw.

HT @legify_law

Jaquith on Opening Up State Legal Data

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has posted Opening Up State Legal Data, at VoxPopuLII.

In this post Waldo provides an update on The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states.

A new version 0.5 of The State Decoded has just been released.

Some code for The State Decoded is on GitHub:

• Waldo’s repository is here;
• Others’ repositories are here.

HT @LIICornell and @waldojaquith

French Constitution and Codes Available in Bulk on GitHub

Full text of the French Constitution and Codes, in ASCII .txt format, have been made available for bulk download on GitHub, by Legifrance.

Respecting the Constitution, texts available include:

• Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen de 1789
• Préambule de la Constitution du 27 octobre 1946
• Constitution du 4 octobre 1958
• Charte de l’environnement de 2004

Respecting the Codes, all national codes currently in force appear to be available.

According to the README file, these texts are being distributed as part of the French Government’s Grande Participation Citoyenne initiative.

This repository is another example of GitLaw.

HT Benoit Boissinot

New Congressional Data Available for Free Bulk Download: Bill Data 1973- , Members 1789-

Two new free and open sources of bulk data about the U.S. Congress have been created by Eric Mill of Sunlight Foundation, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, and posted on GitHub:

• Congressional bill data, 1973 to present, scraped from THOMAS
• “Every bill has a JSON file, data.json, with fields related to a bill’s ID, status, names, sponsorship, amendments, and history.”

• congress-legislators: Data about Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML:
• Data come from several sources. “Each legislator record is grouped into four guaranteed parts: id’s which relate the record to other databases, name information (first, last, etc.), biographical information (birthday, gender), and terms served in Congress.”

• congress scrapers:
• The code of the scrapers used to harvest the data.

HT @konklone:

Been working with @JoshData and @derekwillis on a public scraper and dataset for legislation in Congress. It works! github.com/unitedstates/c…—
Eric Mill (@konklone) October 05, 2012

,

There's also an amazing dataset on legislators back to 1789, donated magnanimously by @JoshData and converted to YAML: github.com/unitedstates/c…—
Eric Mill (@konklone) October 05, 2012

,

The data we gathered from THOMAS is all available for bulk download, back to 1973: github.com/unitedstates/c…—
Eric Mill (@konklone) October 05, 2012

GitLaw in Germany: Deutsche Bundesgesetze- und verordnungen im Markdown auf GitHub = German Federal Laws and Regulations in Markdown on GitHub

German federal laws and regulations appear to have been marked up in Markdown format and placed on GitHub, at
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze#german-federal-laws-and-regulations
.

According to the project’s ReadMe, “The source is the XML version of the laws from www.gesetze-im-internet.de “

Scrapers and other tools associated with this project appear to be on GitHub at
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze-tools
.

The project seems consistent with the recent trend commonly called GitLaw.

For details on updates and other issues, please see the project’s ReadMe.

The names of the personnel on this project are unknown. The Twitter account associated with this project appears to be @bundesgit.

HT @newsycombinator and @sclopit.

Jaquith Releases First Version of The State Decoded Open Legal Data Platform for States

Waldo Jaquith has released the first version of The State Decoded, an open software platform that enables open public access to state legislative data and court decisions.

According to the Readme posted along with the code at GitHub, version 1.0 of The State Decoded is written in PHP and MySQL.

Development of The State Decoded has been funded by a Knight News Challenge grant.

The initial implementation of The State Decoded, called Virginia Decoded, went live in March 2012.

For more information on The State Decoded or Virginia Decoded, please see:

• Waldo’s posts about the project at The State Decoded Website
• this post about the launch of Virginia Decoded
• this interview with Waldo about the development of The State Decoded.