[HN Gopher] The Corpus of United States State Statutes-Design, C...
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       The Corpus of United States State Statutes-Design, Construction and
       Use
        
       Author : cwmoore
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2024-11-14 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (papers.ssrn.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (papers.ssrn.com)
        
       | mistrial9 wrote:
       | this research paper says that the basis of the collection is 2019
       | version law from fifty US states. The descriptions of why and how
       | are useful here, but this 2019 date implies that a more recent
       | collection, or a very recent collection, is not available to the
       | public under a broad license. The texts they build from are
       | specifically owned by the public, not a research group or spinoff
       | company. Historically, compendiums, analysis and indexing is real
       | work that costs real money, usually in protected print format.
       | 
       | Is it too much to ask for, that any link to code or data might be
       | included somewhere in this pre-print research paper?
        
         | showerst wrote:
         | There have been updates since 2019, most states publish an
         | updated code annually.
         | 
         | I wonder if there are licensing issues w/ that, since it's a
         | scrape of Justia. US law falls into a slightly complicated
         | legal situation where the law is public domain, but various
         | organizational bits can be copyrighted (see Georgia v.
         | Public.Resource.Org, Inc.). And a number of states' official
         | copies are on Lexis who has very aggressive scraping
         | protection.
         | 
         | A different scrape of Justia is included in at least one of the
         | big ML legal corpuses, so it's already in use commercially and
         | they're not publicly suing people left and right over it.
         | 
         | I've been thinking of spooling up an openstates-esque project
         | to scrape all 50 into a common format via the original source
         | documents, but it's a big undertaking when most people who
         | don't have strict ethical/legal concerns just scrape justia or
         | casetext.
        
           | singleshot_ wrote:
           | A lot of / some of this is rooted in the fact that state
           | legislatures pass acts, but we want to deal with codes.
           | 
           | An act might change the law in several different "places."
           | Maybe there's a criminal statute, a modification to a
           | sentencing law, and a new addition to a statute of
           | limitations. If you look at the -"act, you see all these
           | changes in one block of text, in sort of a different-like
           | format.
           | 
           | But when you look at the code you realize the statute of
           | limitations is hundreds of pages away from the criminal
           | statute, which are in different titles or articles or what-
           | have-you. What happened?
           | 
           | Well, someone painstakingly started with the first act passed
           | by the legislature and applied every additional and change
           | set forth in each act, keeping a numbering system intact,
           | until they got to the law today. Their work is copyrighted,
           | even if the acts themselves weren't.
           | 
           | I would not take every word of this comment as gospel in
           | every state, but nevertheless I hope it promotes either
           | understanding or further discussion.
           | 
           | (To be clear I believe parent understands all my thoughts
           | already and am not trying to convince that author).
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-14 23:01 UTC)