[HN Gopher] Spanish legislation as a Git repo
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Spanish legislation as a Git repo
        
       Author : enriquelop
       Score  : 676 points
       Date   : 2026-03-28 12:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | enriquelop wrote:
       | I built a pipeline that converts all Spanish state legislation
       | into version-controlled Markdown. Each law is a file, each reform
       | is a real git commit with the historical date. 8,642 laws, 27,866
       | commits.
       | 
       | The idea: legislation is just patches on patches on patches. Git
       | already solves this. Instead of reading "strike paragraph 3 and
       | replace with...", you get an actual diff.
       | 
       | The repo is the product. Browse any law, git log to see its full
       | reform history, git diff to see exactly what changed.
       | 
       | Built the pipeline in ~4 hours with Claude Code. Source is BOE
       | (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API.
       | 
       | Exploring whether there's a business here -- structured
       | legislation API for legaltech/compliance, or just a useful open
       | dataset. Curious what HN would build with this data.
        
         | 7777777phil wrote:
         | cool idea, how far back (in time) do those 27k commits go?
         | 
         | Just thinking how this could maybe used for (automated)
         | research / visualization on the evolution of (spanish - in this
         | case) law
        
           | codethief wrote:
           | > how far back (in time) do those 27k commits go
           | 
           | Looking at the commit dates (which seem to be derived from
           | the original publication dates) the history seems quite
           | sparse/incomplete(?) I mean, there have only been 26 commits
           | since 2000.
        
             | Meneth wrote:
             | It seems the commits aren't in proper date order. Here are
             | some newer changes, placed before the latest commits:
             | https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-
             | es/commits/master/?af...
        
               | forgotpwd16 wrote:
               | It's related to commits actually having a parent-child
               | structure (forming a graph) and timestamps
               | (commit/author) being metadata. So commits 1->2->3->4
               | could be modified to have timestamps 1->3->2->4. I know
               | GitHub prefers sorting with author over commit date, but
               | don't know how topology is handled.
        
               | codethief wrote:
               | > It's related to commits actually having a parent-child
               | structure (forming a graph) and timestamps
               | (commit/author) being metadata.
               | 
               | Yeah, I think everyone is aware. It's just that the last
               | couple dozen commits, to me, looked like commits had been
               | created in chronological order, so that topological order
               | == chronological order.
               | 
               | > I know GitHub prefers sorting with author over commit
               | date, but don't know how topology is handled.
               | 
               | Commits are usually sorted topologically.
        
         | artirdx wrote:
         | Laws intent are often clarified in courts through judgments. If
         | you can overlay the judgements on top of the corresponding law,
         | at correct points in time, I think that will have value. It
         | might, for example, show which laws were referenced the most
         | and which needed to be clarified the most. It might give
         | insights into what legal language constructs stood the test of
         | time and which had to be repeatedly clarified.
        
           | da_chicken wrote:
           | That's true, but it might not be as important here.
           | 
           | Spain is not a country with a Common Law legal system
           | entirely like the US or the UK. They have a civil law system
           | where prior court judgement does not form a strictly binding
           | precedent. Prior judgements can be important, but case law is
           | not really a thing.
        
             | tephra wrote:
             | I wonder how true this is, we have the same system in
             | Sweden, that court judgement are not legally binding
             | precedent for lower courts. But in practice lower courts
             | will follow the rulings made by the high court.
             | 
             | Is it not the same in Spain at all?
        
               | philistine wrote:
               | It's the same in Spain, which makes OPs proposal kind of
               | useless. The big distinction between a civil and a common
               | law system is the fundamentals. A country's civil code is
               | properly defined, while a common law's system is based on
               | previous cases you have to dig through to find the
               | basics.
        
               | markdown wrote:
               | > while a common law's system is based on previous cases
               | you have to dig through to find the basics
               | 
               | In other words, you have to hire a lawyer. They really
               | built a great system for themselves, didn't they?
        
               | amszmidt wrote:
               | Would be nice if someone did it with Swedens laws too!
        
               | mrimskog wrote:
               | I built it with Claude Code last summer :) Check it out:
               | https://github.com/se-lex/sfs
               | 
               | It's generated by this CLI: https://github.com/se-
               | lex/sfs-processor (md with temporal tags, html or Git
               | commits as output format)
        
           | dotancohen wrote:
           | Laws are often cascaded as well. Specifically in this case,
           | Spain is subdivided into Comunidades Autonomas - each have
           | their own elected parliament. And inside those are cities
           | with their own local laws.
           | 
           | So while this project does track laws, is there any facility
           | to determine which laws from which bodies are relevant to a
           | specific activity in a specific location?
        
             | embedding-shape wrote:
             | > And inside those are cities with their own local laws.
             | 
             | No, cities don't have their own laws, but the autonomous
             | communities do have some influence in some laws and
             | regulations (not all), like the amount of income tax you
             | have to pay and so on. But cities within the autonomous
             | communities don't have their own laws.
        
               | donalhunt wrote:
               | No by(e)-laws in Spain? Certainly a thing in the UK,
               | Ireland and I believe US and Canada. Is that a common law
               | thing?
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | "By-laws" is typically the name of the rules/"laws"
               | inside of a company or organization, I'm not familiar
               | with that word in the context of "nation-wide
               | criminal/civil laws".
               | 
               | Regardless, cities do not have their own "local laws" in
               | the way your comment made it seem. We have national laws,
               | and minor differences in various autonomous communities,
               | since they have some legislative power to control their
               | own industry, commerce, education and some more stuff.
        
               | ninalanyon wrote:
               | > "By-laws" is typically the name of the rules/"laws"
               | inside of a company
               | 
               | I suspect that this should be qualified by "in the US"
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | No, I was talking about Spain, I have no idea how it
               | works in the US. I thought mentioning "autonomous
               | communities" was enough context to make it evident, but
               | maybe it wasn't.
        
               | eep_social wrote:
               | as an american I might call those "local ordinance" when
               | they come from a smaller rulemaker like a town
        
               | dylan604 wrote:
               | > inside of a company or organization,
               | 
               | Corps and cities are very similarly structured. Each are
               | charted at the start, with corps getting governed by
               | boards and c-suite types while cities have mayors and
               | city council types. Both file paperwork to exist within
               | the state. Both are subject to state laws, but are
               | allowed to make up regulations specific to them as long
               | as they are within the state's laws.
               | 
               | In the end, it's all just paperwork, at least in the US
        
               | Mordisquitos wrote:
               | Local authorities in Spain do have the authority to enact
               | their own law-ish regulations, which are called _'
               | ordenanzas'_. For example, if I remember correctly,
               | motorbikes are allowed to park on the pavement by default
               | in Barcelona unless a sign says otherwise, but it is
               | forbidden in Madrid unless a sign explicitly allows it.
               | 
               | I think local government in Spain has at least as much
               | authority as it does in the UK, maybe more, but almost
               | certainly less than it does in the US.
        
             | Mordisquitos wrote:
             | I may be wrong, but I think autonomous community
             | legislation is not published in the BOE itself (the
             | Official State Gazette), but rather in each of their
             | corresponding official gazettes (e.g. DOGC for Catalonia,
             | BOCM for Madrid, BOA for Aragon, BOJA for Andalusia, etc.).
        
             | youknownothing wrote:
             | yes: Comunidades Autonomas can only defined laws as
             | "permitted" by the central government under a Estatuto de
             | Autonomia (Autonomy statute? not good with legal jargon),
             | which is effectively a law of its own. So at the central
             | level the law says "in this particularly region, matters of
             | education are dealt with regionally", and then that's when
             | regional laws apply. Same from local laws. In essence, all
             | laws emanate from the central government, but the central
             | government decides to delegate some areas; technically,
             | they could always take it back.
        
           | pseingatl wrote:
           | Rarely in a civil law jurisdiction, essential in common-law
           | jurisdictions.
        
           | SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
           | Perhaps reference it in the commit trailer?
        
           | artirdx wrote:
           | Another thought. Assuming such a dataset (laws+ judgement)
           | could be built, an argument can be made to Parliament to
           | draft new laws that take into account all those judgments and
           | then mark those judgments and old laws in a way that they can
           | no longer be referenced (archived?). This might simplify
           | future cases leading to lower legal costs.
           | 
           | And who knows maybe a way could be found to create smart
           | contracts (smart oracles? smart judges?) and those could lead
           | to instant judgements.
        
         | Bewelge wrote:
         | Oooh Can you elaborate a bit how the gazette is publishing
         | them? Like what format did you have to parse. And how many
         | documents were there in total? I tried doing the same for
         | German laws 1-2 years ago but LLMs weren't smart enough yet.
         | And the costs would've been at least a couple of thousand EUR.
         | 
         | Ed: Nevermind, I missed the "BOE (Spain's official gazette)
         | consolidated legislation API" part. Sending jealous greetings
         | from Germany. We just have a bunch of PDFs in Germany. And the
         | private entity that has been publishing them for decades even
         | claims copyright on them!
        
           | sivann wrote:
           | Heh we have the exact same status in Greece. It's sad the
           | upstream is so sloppy.
        
           | brcmthrowaway wrote:
           | Do you mean DIN?
        
         | Mordisquitos wrote:
         | Congratulations, this is a brilliant resource. You have done
         | one of those countless things which I often think about doing,
         | but my utter lack of follow-through and other distractions make
         | it a fantasy. I cannot wait to clone the repo and explore it.
         | 
         | As to what can be done with the data, maybe one interesting
         | step could be a graph-database regarding laws which reference
         | other laws or the definitions that they depend on?
        
         | daedric7 wrote:
         | Please! Can you make the same for Portugal? Laws here are a
         | mess of reforms...
        
           | upcoming-sesame wrote:
           | is there a similar API for Portugal?
        
         | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
         | It would be a good place to start if you wanted to hard fork
         | the government.
        
         | youknownothing wrote:
         | This is brilliant. I had thought about this for a long while,
         | you see laws that are just "go to law 132 and amend paragraph
         | 4, then go to law 24 and amend paragraph 9". Basically "laws"
         | are recorded as diffs, and then it's up to the reader to put up
         | the final product in their heads. They should be doing it this
         | way!
        
           | wyan wrote:
           | To be fair, the BOE website often offers the consolidated
           | version for many important laws, which includes further
           | amendments by other laws in one text.
        
         | rmonvfer wrote:
         | I looked into this a while back and IIRC, the consolidated
         | legislation doesn't cover all legislation but only a handful.
         | 
         | Also, in my experience (having built in this space before),
         | regulations aren't really the issue. Court rulings are, because
         | there's no open data for them in Spain. And the potential users
         | for a paid product (legal professionals) already know the law;
         | the key players (big law firms) have their own databases of
         | annotated and verified court rulings and other documents.
        
         | airstrike wrote:
         | This is really cool. I've thought about it for a long time as
         | well but never had the idea of just using git, which is equal
         | parts genius and "obvious" in hindsight, as most great ideas
         | are.
         | 
         | I think the corollary that comes to mind is that reforms, with
         | their git commits, are incrementally valuable if they refer to
         | other parts of the legislation, previous commits, etc. to give
         | more context as to the intent at the time of the law. So maybe
         | there's a way to distill the legislative process into more PR
         | and commit-oriented work--likely ex post as you did here, but
         | perhaps in the future as part of an actual workflow.
         | 
         | And then maybe I'd pitch the idea to some technologically-
         | inclined local government.
        
         | aerhardt wrote:
         | I've had the idea of playing with our laws and trying to ask
         | questions about their growing volume and complexity. This is
         | timely and dope Enrique - mil gracias!
        
         | zer00eyz wrote:
         | Too bad that author, and committer are individuals and not
         | lists. It would be good to see who wrote them and how the
         | voting went as well.
        
         | manunamz wrote:
         | Very cool project. How are you thinking about indexing and
         | discoverability? Git gives you the change history, but
         | navigating the corpus itself seems like the harder problem:
         | Finding related laws, understanding hierarchical relationships
         | between statutes...
         | 
         | Have you considered embedding semantic hierarchical structure
         | directly in the markdown? Something like
         | https://github.com/wikibonsai/semtree ? It lets you build a
         | navigable tree across markdown files using indented
         | [[wikilinks]] as the organizational spine. Could be a natural
         | fit for legislation that already has an inherent taxonomy
         | (constitutional - organic - ordinary, or by subject area).
        
         | mattogodoy wrote:
         | I've thought of this of many times! But you're missing the most
         | important part: every reform should be a PR. With discussions
         | and all. That would be the purest form of voting. And all
         | decisions to reach the current state of a law would ve
         | registered and available for everyone to read. Democracy 2.0.
         | 
         | Dreaming costs nothing.
        
         | gopher_space wrote:
         | > Exploring whether there's a business here -- structured
         | legislation API for legaltech/compliance, or just a useful open
         | dataset. Curious what HN would build with this data.
         | 
         | Compiling legal data for specific domains and then selling
         | processes that rely on your _private_ compilation is a battle-
         | tested business plan, but there 's a lot of manual work
         | involved and the cost of that work becomes a barrier to entry.
         | 
         | Generally speaking, the people who'd like to cross that barrier
         | are both open to ideas and funded well enough to run little
         | experiments.
        
         | markdown wrote:
         | I've long wanted to do this, but don't have the api. This is
         | much harder to do with pdfs
        
         | rayshan wrote:
         | Would love to get the U.S. tax law as a dump of markdown files.
         | Then everyone can build their own TurboTax.
         | 
         | https://www.irs.gov/privacy-disclosure/tax-code-regulations-...
        
       | j-bos wrote:
       | This is brilliant. I wish this were available for all
       | legislations. There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially
       | solved with existing tech frameworks.
        
         | appstorelottery wrote:
         | I couldn't agree more - this is fantastic work.
        
         | Schmerika wrote:
         | > There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with
         | existing tech frameworks.
         | 
         | There really, really are.
         | 
         | The legal industry is _well aware_ of that fact - and how many
         | billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more
         | efficient and understandable.
         | 
         | You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying'
         | Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and
         | complicated [0]?
         | 
         | Well, lawyers know just as well or better how to butter their
         | bread; and they will pull out every dirty trick they have to
         | scupper attempts to make practising law more transparent or
         | efficient in any way.
         | 
         | 0 - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/09/tax-prep-
         | companies-...
        
           | wolfi1 wrote:
           | unfortunately, laws are not everything. you need to know how
           | to get around them. our country for example has the habit of
           | creating a lex fugitiva that means that some regulations
           | could be changed in other not related laws. good luck finding
           | the correct regulation without a law degree
        
           | DennisP wrote:
           | It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I
           | used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a
           | background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely
           | made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard
           | to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough
           | time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time
           | before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of
           | course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other
           | unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to
           | front because the back was where they put all the graft. An
           | example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a
           | congressman's birthday party.
           | 
           | For a while I thought about trying to write software that
           | would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written
           | bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after
           | with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the
           | bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-
           | date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're
           | online. And LLMs might make the project easier.
        
             | FuckButtons wrote:
             | Presumably, there must be some point in time where the bill
             | is made public in some form before going to a vote. If you
             | could get the right tool in the hands of a journalist to
             | turn whatever obscure format it's in into something legible
             | by an ordinary person there's probably value there.
        
           | newyankee wrote:
           | and then we have people touting Jevon's paradox as outcome of
           | AI disruption leading to more work. Before we create new work
           | we need to figure out how to reduce incentive of people to
           | unnecessarily complicate stuff and to be honest the answer is
           | never clean or easy
        
         | f1shy wrote:
         | I would like to have a legal advisor based on that. At least
         | for a first question, qithout paying a lawyer
        
         | Esophagus4 wrote:
         | > so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with
         | existing tech frameworks.
         | 
         | Out of curiosity, like what specifically?
         | 
         | Didn't DOGE's failure highlight that it actually wasn't
         | trivial? I'm skeptical at first glance but open to being proven
         | wrong.
        
           | bojan wrote:
           | DOGE wasn't actually trying to make things more efficient.
           | You can't count it as an honest attempt.
        
           | hirako2000 wrote:
           | DOGE made the token gain more in market cap than it saved in
           | expenses. Despite having at head a master of blind layoffs.
        
           | 0x3f wrote:
           | > Out of curiosity, like what specifically?
           | 
           | For example, there are thousands of divisions of government
           | out there provisioning largely the same systems in duplicate.
           | E.g. the very local government here has a web portal for the
           | sports venue bookings like pools and tennis courts. They have
           | a waste collection portal. Local tax portal.
           | 
           | Only recently has this been slightly standardized but even
           | those efforts are purely regional. You might get 5 local
           | councils in the city using one SaaS platform, another 5 using
           | another SaaS platform, and another 5 rolling their own. For
           | each function of local government.
           | 
           | Nevermind the fact that a local government in France like
           | this probably has very similar needs to one in Belgium or
           | even the US.
           | 
           | And the worst part is they are terrible at procurement so
           | even when they do consolidate, they're basically getting
           | scammed.
           | 
           | I often think about starting a cost-plus-priced open core
           | project to deal with these issues. Like we build common
           | government functions, and sell it for cost plus 20% markup,
           | with a licence that lets the gov run it themselves if we ever
           | go bust. But then I think procurement is largely a grift game
           | and it might not do well for that reason.
        
             | akudha wrote:
             | Wouldn't consolidation lead to monopoly? If 50 local
             | governments use the same SaaS/vendor, the 51st local
             | government would likely go for the same vendor just because
             | 50 others used that vendor before them, no? What prevents
             | the vendor from jacking up prices or general
             | enshittification at the stage?
        
               | 0x3f wrote:
               | > What prevents the vendor from jacking up prices or
               | general enshittification at the stage?
               | 
               | Well what I'm proposing building would be source-
               | available and licensed such that the gov can run it
               | themselves if it ever gets too expensive. The sub-gov
               | entities should really band together for the negotiation
               | though, then they can ask for whatever they want: non-
               | profit vendors, liberal licensing, price agreements. A
               | collective of government buyers form basically a
               | monopsony larger than any individual vendor could ever
               | be.
        
           | j-bos wrote:
           | To be clear, I wasn't exclusively referring to government. I
           | was actually only thinking of the use of git-like version
           | control across a number of different technical domains, law,
           | design, book writing, architecture, etc
        
         | rafram wrote:
         | Everyone in government knows what Track Changes is. The
         | standard format of a piece of legislation in British-influenced
         | systems _is_ a diff. The tech field does not have secret
         | knowledge that the rest of humanity lacks.
        
           | dinkumthinkum wrote:
           | I was thinking the same thing. I feel like people in software
           | tech always think they have secret powers that experts in
           | other fields can't imagine.
        
           | j-bos wrote:
           | > Everyone in government knows That's part of the point good
           | rafram, I'm not in government but I've looked up laws for at
           | least three jurisdictions and have never encountered version
           | control. A tool at the bottom of a drawer or in only one
           | person's belt is not a tool to anyone else.
        
         | idiotsecant wrote:
         | And, in the example of the stereotypical venture capital
         | seeking techbro junk that has somehow infected the entire
         | world, this project doesn't actually understand or solve any
         | real world problems.
         | 
         | No shade on the author, they made a fun thing. I'm directing my
         | cannons more towards the parent post idea that the world needs
         | software developers for their rare genius to use their
         | beautiful brains to solve problems in ways no actual
         | participant in the system could have ever thought of.
         | 
         | The additude that because you can prompt a LLM to write some
         | python you are also uniquely situated to solve the world's
         | problems is how we built an entire generation of automated
         | solutions worse than what we had before.
        
         | dgreisen wrote:
         | Our nonprofit, Open Law Library, is working on this exact
         | problem. It is definitely not trivial, but it is very doable.
         | We partner directly with governments to help them implement so
         | the git repos become the canonical record (rather than just an
         | unofficial mirror).
         | 
         | Maryland just launched their regs on our platform:
         | 
         | https://regs.maryland.gov (https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-
         | xml-codified)
         | 
         | Feel free to reach out (email in bio) if you would like your
         | community to publish their official laws on GitHub!
        
       | coopykins wrote:
       | Hey, very nice! Seems like a great way to have LLMs answer
       | questions about the laws more reliably.
        
         | worksonmine wrote:
         | Hey! How can I make this about LLMs?
         | 
         | (Many countries' laws are already available online and included
         | in the dataset they're trained on. The project is very cool for
         | humans though.)
        
       | d--b wrote:
       | I think French laws have been on website that's like that for a
       | while
        
         | codethief wrote:
         | The German parliament even has an official git repository:
         | https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze
         | 
         | Looks like it's been abandoned, though. :(
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | The GitHub org being called "bundestag" doesn't mean that
           | it's anything official. It looks like it's made by
           | independent activists.
        
             | codethief wrote:
             | Oops, I should have checked this more carefully. Thanks!
        
         | Rexxar wrote:
         | https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/
         | 
         | If you go on particular laws, you can see the previous versions
         | and how it changed. Example:
         | https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000...
         | 
         | Click on "version" then "comparer" buttons and you will see a
         | diff.
        
       | adjejmxbdjdn wrote:
       | Love this idea
        
       | smashah wrote:
       | I've been saying for years that any and all legal documents (and
       | all lawyers) should be required to be on/use git
        
       | larsiusprime wrote:
       | Is the idea that the commits themselves are also time stamped
       | with the date of the legislation/amendment too?
        
         | Thev00d00 wrote:
         | Yes
        
           | larsiusprime wrote:
           | Brilliant!
        
       | Quarrel wrote:
       | Great project.
       | 
       | For others wondering, while most of the Franco-era laws were
       | nuked in 1978, this does include lots of old laws (ie pre-20th
       | C).
       | 
       | However, the source material starts with a sqashed commit in 1960
       | :) So no changelog before that. The BOE source though is pretty
       | phenomonal, they've scanned files going back to the 1600s so far.
        
       | rwmj wrote:
       | This is great. Compare it to British legislation which is frankly
       | a mess of patches. Example picked fairly much at random, this law
       | was originally passed in 1990 and has been "patched" regularly:
       | 
       | https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/9
       | 
       | Laws being passed are these ludicrous sets of patches:
       | 
       | https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/9/part/1
        
         | codethief wrote:
         | I think such "ludicrous sets of patches" are very common in
         | many jurisdictions. (At least in Germany they are.) I agree,
         | though, git patches would be a lot nicer.
        
         | gus_massa wrote:
         | I think it's similar everywhere. IIRC from time to time here in
         | Argentina when there are too many big changes, the legislature
         | make copy of one old law with all the amends and add all the
         | new ones and approve the new version. Let's say every 50 years
         | or so, and not all the laws at the same time. So the "current"
         | law is a mostly a mess of patches.
         | 
         | The main difference is that in Britain the judge decisions
         | become almost-laws, so it's like a repo with too many people
         | with commit right. I think in Spain the judge decisions have
         | less weight and only the legislature has commit permissions .
        
         | hirako2000 wrote:
         | Also the principle of common law.
        
         | gib444 wrote:
         | Let's hear your solution to the mess.
        
         | postepowanieadm wrote:
         | It's not messy. You have to take into account that every patch
         | is voted separately - read Robert's Rules of Order for an
         | enlightenment ;)
        
       | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
       | This is really great, anyone know of a Dutch version?
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554274
        
           | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
           | yeah thats a great start, however the md files of every
           | change are really helpful in going though history and
           | understand steps with llms'
        
       | dorianmariecom wrote:
       | for france there is https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
        
         | icpmoles wrote:
         | For older edits there is https://github.com/steeve/france.code-
         | civil
         | 
         | Unfortunately Git is based on Unix timestamps so everything
         | pre-1970 has the wrong date.
        
       | MomsAVoxell wrote:
       | Great idea! I hope you did something like:                 $ git
       | commit --amend --author="Author Name <author@spanish.gov>" --no-
       | edit
       | 
       | .. with the details for the author of each commit.
       | 
       | Then, it would be simply amazing to run gource, sit back, and
       | watch where all the noise is coming from.
       | 
       | Gource:
       | 
       | https://github.com/acaudwell/gource
       | 
       | What gource looks like:
       | 
       | https://gource.io/
       | 
       | I've long wanted to see gource applied in other sociologically-
       | relevant contexts and this'd be a real good one ..
        
         | PenguinRevolver wrote:
         | I tried using Gource and... well, the commits were not sorted
         | by _date_ , so the time goes all over the place.
        
       | throwaway_2626 wrote:
       | This is amazing. I have a couple of suggestions: - Maybe breaking
       | the "Spain" folder into subfolders? Not sure what categories
       | could be used, but browsing would be easier. - There's a missed
       | opportunity in having different authors for the commits (maybe
       | the "legislatura" number), and possibly, tags/labels including
       | the political parties that voted in favor of each.
       | 
       | I'll take a look at data to enrich it :).
        
       | d0m wrote:
       | I wonder which country will be the first to be run entirely by AI
       | instead of corrupt politicians
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | I don't think a country where everyone is absolutely right
         | would work.
        
           | canyp wrote:
           | You're absolutely right.
        
         | logicallee wrote:
         | >I wonder which country will be the first to be run entirely by
         | AI instead of corrupt politicians
         | 
         | State of Utopia[1] has this manifesto[2]. In our estimation
         | (and we use AI a lot), it is not powerful enough to govern a
         | country yet. We thought it was worth trying anyway.[3] We would
         | like it to be able to handle contexts that are millions of
         | times greater (think more like 1 billion tokens than 1 million
         | tokens), and even so AI governance is a very difficult matter.
         | In addition, once AI governance is achieved, how can you truly
         | trust the governance model not to be corrupted? Transparent
         | government run by AI is an additional point of difficulty.
         | These days, the most difficult unsolved problem is how to
         | introduce voting and users' comments without inviting comment
         | spam and vote rigging. You can watch my latest update here[4]
         | (I'm sorry, it's very quiet), and we welcome your input on all
         | subjects. We have a fully autonomous agent currently running
         | the country, which consists of a Mac Mini and a Claude
         | subscription (plus our own dedicated server in a country that
         | recognizes us, and we have a couple of other embassies by
         | agreement and legal contract). But in practice this government
         | just does whatever I tell it. It's not advanced enough to run a
         | code of laws, which is one of the basic requirements citizens
         | expect of their country. The size of problem space for running
         | a country is larger than models can handle, but many things
         | help.
         | 
         | One of the best hopes we have is with deterministic offline
         | models where we share the pipeline with people ahead of time,
         | so they know exactly how it will work. This could be a
         | trustworthy matter of dispute resolution, if we get the
         | architecture right.
         | 
         | For example, our country could help you sign a contract and in
         | case of dispute, both parties could submit supporting documents
         | and make statements and the offline model they agreed to at the
         | time of signing their contract could adjudicate. This pipeline
         | could be transparent from the start. This won't satisfy
         | everyone, but might provide the minimum standard of having a
         | code of laws that assists with contract enforcement. For now,
         | all you can really do is keep checking our site for updates and
         | leave comments about what direction you'd like the country to
         | take. (For example, you can leave a comment on my latest update
         | on Youtube.)
         | 
         | [1] https://stateofutopia.com
         | 
         | [2]
         | https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5...
         | 
         | [3] https://medium.com/@rviragh/ai-is-not-ready-to-create-
         | utopia...
         | 
         | [4] https://www.youtube.com/live/K0dgrPRWPCs
        
       | zaep wrote:
       | Nobody seems to have (yet) mentioned the most recent (rn) commit
       | [1] dated 2099. I can't really figure out where the date came
       | from, at the source noted in the commit I find no '2099', I can't
       | see it being a joke, if it's a bug it's not obvious to me..
       | 
       | I'm sure I won't be the only one curious, please enlighten me.
       | 
       | [1]: <https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-
       | es/commit/424cbc96507...>
        
         | gloosx wrote:
         | Classic. He forgot to add "make no mistakes" to the prompt.
         | Based on the commits alone Im not sure anyone really reviewed
         | the correctness of the git history.
         | 
         | When someone specifically mentions "built in ~4h with Claude
         | Code" they probably didn't care that much about the outcome
         | quality
        
           | forgotpwd16 wrote:
           | It's a cool PoC even if implementation/result isn't perfect.
        
       | ivanjermakov wrote:
       | I'm surprised the world is not running a system where laws are
       | formally encoded using some DSL that would allow making decision
       | (guilty/not guilty) using formal logic. Perhaps there is not much
       | interest from law making/enforcing parties for this either.
        
         | rrr_oh_man wrote:
         | That's a common fantasy of developers who haven't touched grass
         | in a while.
        
           | bonoboTP wrote:
           | It's a rehashing of Leibniz's "Calculemus!".
           | 
           | It's not a fully stupid idea, many rules can be automated and
           | indeed have already been. The things that courts still have
           | to decide manually are the leftovers that require more human
           | judgment.
        
             | fph wrote:
             | This pipe dream will soon be replaced by "let's have the
             | first degree of judgment be ChatGPT; human judges should
             | only deal with appeals".
        
               | rrr_oh_man wrote:
               | Sounds like every self-driving startup
        
           | krzyk wrote:
           | Why is it a fantasy to have a fair system with no room for
           | interpretation?
        
         | rileymat2 wrote:
         | You'd also probably be surprised about how subjective and
         | unevenly applied the law is... by design, to allow appropriate
         | outcomes and discretion.
         | 
         | Edit: Consider the following words included in law.
         | 
         | "reasonable" "reckless" "due care"
        
         | bonoboTP wrote:
         | Have you actually tried reading a single law? If you have, have
         | you tried to write just one article in formal logic?
         | 
         | Certain laws, like parts of tax law may be possible to turn
         | into code, like percentages and deadlines, but even those often
         | carry natural language conditions that can't be evaluated so
         | easily. Seriously, try it.
        
         | gloosx wrote:
         | Maybe we should go further and use some DSL to speak with each
         | other in the first place? Would def make everything straight
         | and eliminate ambiguity!
        
           | bonoboTP wrote:
           | That's Lojban.
           | 
           | Turns out, ambiguity is an intentional communicative tool.
        
         | bentcorner wrote:
         | I don't think this is where the problem lies. If you kill
         | someone with intent, it's murder. But the whole system needs to
         | prove that you killed someone with intent beyond a reasonable
         | doubt, and a DSL will not help you there.
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | Law is not 100% exact. For instance, the age of consent in
         | Spain it's 16, and you are adult by 19. You and a group of
         | people had sex with a 15 yo. Your friends are well over 20 (24,
         | 25...), and OFC trialed and jailed. But you, being almost close
         | in maturity to that girl, (and noticed by psychologysts testing
         | both the girl's mindset and yours ) can have the charges
         | perfectly dropped.
         | 
         | Ditto with alcohol laws -18 there-. Selling a cyder to a 17 +
         | 11 months guy would have a much smaller fine than a hard liquor
         | to a 14yo.
         | 
         | The reverse it's true, too. 14yo are the minimum age to be
         | legally punished. If you are 13 and barely stole some $20 Steam
         | card -if any- you just got sentenced to spend your formative
         | years in a juvenile center.
         | 
         | But, if you are 13yo gang member and you have a longass list of
         | both petty and hard crimes and the last one has been a bloody
         | crime with serious injuries or homicide... you can be sent as
         | an _exception_ to an adult prison because your mentality and
         | mindset are not the ones from the early teens.
         | 
         | Especially if your body it's really developed for your age and
         | you basically commanded mini-clans as the ones you can see in
         | Ireland, Italy and the like. When you can smack down adults at
         | age 13 and even ilegally drive a car, the Spanish constitution
         | wont save you. Ultimately you must -and can- be trialed as an
         | adult but also be able to finish the mandatory education years
         | until you hit 16. Not easy, of course, but sending these kind
         | of people to juvenile centers just generates more thugs than
         | anything else.
         | 
         | If this is difficult for humans, imagine that for software with
         | exact constraints.
        
       | TZubiri wrote:
       | I've seen something like this before, here's the Argentina
       | constitution as a git repo, with reforms as commits. Much shorter
       | in scope, but this was pre LLM coding
       | 
       | P.S: Sadly my PR amendment was repealled
        
       | cyrusradfar wrote:
       | I think this is great. Only limit of git is I can't imagine "git
       | blame" works. It would be nice to know who voted for and against
       | each patch. Git isn't structured for collaborative commits.
        
         | hirako2000 wrote:
         | That could actually be a git commit log with date, votes and
         | other metadata.
         | 
         | But getting the entire country's law into git is already an
         | impressive feat.
        
           | 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
           | If we are spitballing, I think there should be an actual file
           | associated with the text so you can see the vote. A file
           | makes it trivial to grep for "Senator X".
           | 
           | Not git, but Congress actually does have quite a bit of data
           | digitized. A random example[0] -they even provide XML. The
           | Congress data is going to give you all bills - many of which
           | do not pass, so a different mission than this project.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
           | bill/4818
        
         | nuhuhh wrote:
         | Yeah you can, just smash commits on the PR where multiple
         | contributed. It will say it was a collaborative commit in
         | history showing all their avatars.
        
         | embedding-shape wrote:
         | > Git isn't structured for collaborative commits.
         | 
         | Git isn't structured for collaborative commits, but community-
         | wide conventions kind of "patches" support for it on top of the
         | git message body, via "Co-Authored-By: name <name@example.com>"
         | which IIRC most platforms support, and the convention itself
         | initially comes from Linux kernel development.
        
         | 1718627440 wrote:
         | You could have the parliament (meaning including the election
         | cycle) as the main author and then the parties and votes as Co-
         | Authors.
        
         | dinkumthinkum wrote:
         | Is this really a problem we have now, though? This information
         | is publicly available. If everyone here is so excited about
         | LLMs then why would this even be needed? Anthropic can just
         | give us the answer to every question. We don't need nerds that
         | know what git is. :)
        
       | peterhadlaw wrote:
       | Does it include the law that made it okay for Noelia Castillo to
       | commit suicide the other day?
        
         | downsplat wrote:
         | https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2021-4628
        
         | brandnewideas wrote:
         | There are laws that prevent you from committing suicide?
        
           | torcete wrote:
           | It was assisted suicide. Meaning the government helps you to
           | commit suicide.
        
             | downsplat wrote:
             | It's called euthanasia. You can ask the medical system for
             | an assisted suicide if your life situation is extra painful
             | with no hope for recovery.
             | 
             | This case got heaps of media popularity because the
             | christian right wing latched on it, and the father tried as
             | hard as he could to impede the euthanasia. Ultimately got
             | told that the lady unequivocally wants it and qualifies,
             | and he can't override that.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | > Ultimately got told that the lady unequivocally wants
               | it and qualifies, and he can't override that.
               | 
               | Not just once, but five times by different courts,
               | finalized by the European Court of Human Rights!
               | 
               | > Her request had been approved on July 18, 2024, by the
               | Catalonia Guarantee and Evaluation Commission. The
               | commission found that she met all legal requirements, as
               | she had a "nonrecoverable clinical situation," causing
               | "severe dependence, pain, and chronic, disabling
               | suffering."
               | 
               | > But in August of that same year, her father - advised
               | by the ultraconservative religious group Christian
               | Lawyers - began a legal fight to stop the process
               | 
               | > From then on, her father initiated a long legal process
               | that delayed Noelia's euthanasia for 20 months, going
               | through five judicial levels: a Barcelona court, the High
               | Court of Justice of Catalonia, the Supreme Court, the
               | Constitutional Court, and the European Court of Human
               | Rights.
        
               | OrangePilled wrote:
               | Your enthusiasm is remarkable.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | I come from a society that doesn't value compassion that
               | much, so now when I live in Spain which has a lot of it,
               | it's hard not to feel good about it. Wish it was the same
               | in more places in the world, we're all human after all.
        
               | peterhadlaw wrote:
               | Cold-blooded murder ~= "compassion". Got it. Cool.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | Helping someone avoid "nonrecoverable pain, forever"
               | isn't "cold-blooded murder" in my mind, but I figure
               | there is no point is arguing against someone who doesn't
               | understand nuance.
        
               | OrangePilled wrote:
               | It shows.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | Great, guess I've learnt sufficient English to be able to
               | communicate my ideas and thoughts, thanks!
        
             | ks2048 wrote:
             | Generally legal assisted suicide doesn't mean "the
             | government helps you commit suicide" - it means it's not
             | illegal for a doctor assisting a patient to commit suicide.
        
         | embedding-shape wrote:
         | I think it was "okay" even before that law to be euthanized.
         | However, the law adds a "a legal, systematic, balanced and
         | guarantee response to a sustained demand of today's society
         | such as euthanasia".
         | 
         | But yes, it seems it is included indeed:
         | https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es/blob/master/spain/...
         | (which seems to have been well written enough to not needing
         | any changes [so far])
         | 
         | Very glad my country is so compassionate with people that we
         | can facilitate things like things when needed.
        
           | peterhadlaw wrote:
           | "culture of death"
        
             | embedding-shape wrote:
             | We all die, so I suppose for some of us, "good death" is
             | better than "forced to be alive although you don't want
             | to". Worth remembering where the word comes from:
             | 
             | > Euthanasia (from Greek: euthanasia, lit. 'good death':
             | eu, eu, 'well, good' + thanatos, thanatos, 'death') is the
             | practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and
             | suffering.
        
         | mold_aid wrote:
         | I would assume so. But that's probably it; it's for Wikipedia
         | to record the failed attempts of Christianists to make it not
         | "ok."
         | 
         | Like many, you are confusing "making it legal" for "making it
         | ok." But that is of course the root concern of Christianism as
         | an ideological project. Thankfully the correct legal
         | interpretation won out here, as it did in the US Schiavo
         | case(s).
        
         | whattheheckheck wrote:
         | Quite a few happen
         | https://www.statista.com/chart/28130/assisted-suicide-number...
        
       | sigio wrote:
       | I did the same with a limited subset of dutch laws a while back:
       | https://github.com/sigio?tab=repositories&q=wetboek
        
       | 0x3f wrote:
       | Neat. I wonder if there are commercial products that are formal
       | specifications of laws, decisions, etc. Such that you can reason
       | on them via solvers etc.
        
         | embedding-shape wrote:
         | I think it's a rite of passage for every developer who ever
         | touched the ecosystem of law to also wonder the same. Probably
         | even since the invention of "business programming" there been
         | developers wondering this. Many has attempting, so far, I don't
         | think anyone succeeded.
         | 
         | But I'm sure someone at some point might figure it out, you
         | never know :)
        
           | 0x3f wrote:
           | Well, there's a new batch of autoformalization attempts with
           | LLMs now. Although I've also heard people say
           | autoformalization will always be impossible.
           | 
           | It's interesting to wonder what kind of coverage Cycorp
           | managed to achieve internally, and on what domains. Seemingly
           | no job openings at the moment though!
        
         | planteur wrote:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177022
        
           | 0x3f wrote:
           | Nice, now I just need to spend 5 years encoding it all and I
           | can finally start my 'AI' tax evasion consultancy firm.
        
       | vitorbaptistaa wrote:
       | Congratulations! This is a very cool project. A few years ago
       | there were similar ones -- browse gitlaw.
       | 
       | In Brazil we have lexml, a standard to describe the law and their
       | changes over time. It's surprisingly complex.
        
         | phlakaton wrote:
         | Hah! XML strikes again. :-)
         | 
         | I understand that Spain was a participant in LexML as well... I
         | gather they've since converted to something else?
        
       | josalhor wrote:
       | Not only would be cool for laws to have appropiate time stamps so
       | we can "go back in time to how it was at a certain moment", but
       | also if we could have proper git commit diffs of how laws change
       | over time. See this:
       | https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2015-11430
       | 
       | You can see how certain articles have the option to check "how
       | that particular article was at each moment in time". That would
       | be way harder to track, but it would be awesome if not only could
       | you "go back in time and see what the law was" but also "how its
       | been evolving".
        
         | jonhohle wrote:
         | Not only that, but authors and approvers could be used to track
         | who created and voted for each change.
        
           | dan_linder wrote:
           | Then compare wording and structure with other bills proposed
           | elsewhere to look for single sources trying to legalize an
           | agenda or retry after earlier failed attempts.
        
         | upcoming-sesame wrote:
         | it would also be cool to know the "why" that went into the
         | change
        
       | comboy wrote:
       | Add CI to check if new laws don't contradict with any existing
       | ones.
        
         | bertil wrote:
         | You might need to turn laws into formal proofs, and the
         | existence of judges makes me think that's not as likely as you
         | would like. A commenting system would though--trained on
         | countries's precedents, jurisprudence and traditions might.
        
         | whattheheckheck wrote:
         | Can you imagine rebases with merge conflicts?
        
           | bentcorner wrote:
           | This could in theory already happen without any tech, but I
           | suspect since the government is pretty monolithic, any
           | changes in a specific law are all being done by the same set
           | of people.
           | 
           | You might not have merge conflicts but I imagine you could
           | end up with conflicting guidance from two separate pieces of
           | law (e.g., law A says you must wear green on St. Patrick's
           | day, law B outlaws green pajamas).
        
       | bertil wrote:
       | This is a key project, and I'm sure many countries have enough
       | developers who might try and get it done, but a project that can
       | do it for most legal systems (assuming the sources are on-line)
       | would help a lot more people access legal resources.
        
       | SweetSoftPillow wrote:
       | We need it for every country and every law in the history of
       | humanity
        
       | drob518 wrote:
       | The date of the last commit is 2099.
        
       | saglogog wrote:
       | Nice
        
       | AtomicOrbital wrote:
       | all of government data including all laws especially tax law
       | needs to be put online and optimized by ML
        
       | MinimalAction wrote:
       | The general sentiment here is that it's a great project. Could
       | someone please explain why? All I'm seeing is that laws are
       | updated with commits within markdown files.
        
         | saadn92 wrote:
         | The value is in the semantics git gives you for free once the
         | data is in this shape. Right now if you want to understand how
         | a law changed, you go to the official gazette website and read
         | a document that says "strike paragraph 3 of article 12 and
         | replace with the following text." You're doing the diff in your
         | head.
         | 
         | With this repo, git log --oneline -- spain/BOE-A-1978-31229.md
         | gives you every reform to the Spanish Constitution in one
         | command. git diff between any two reforms shows you exactly
         | what changed in context. git blame tells you which reform
         | touched which article. These are operations that would take a
         | lawyer hours of cross-referencing, and they're free once the
         | data is structured this way.
         | 
         | The other great thing: you can build tooling on top of it and
         | use it with the CLI.
        
           | MinimalAction wrote:
           | Thanks for a beautiful explanation. Makes sense now that this
           | repo enables git diff, git base to reveal changes easier.
        
             | saadn92 wrote:
             | of course, thanks for asking a great question!
        
         | xeromal wrote:
         | The why is that it's cool. Why it's not cool for you cannot be
         | explained by us, only you.
        
           | MinimalAction wrote:
           | I didn't say it's not cool. I was trying to understand the
           | utility of it being great.
        
             | xeromal wrote:
             | Coolness and greatness can be the same thing.
             | 
             | For instance, the big Lebowski is great and cool.
        
       | Ericson2314 wrote:
       | All legislatures need to work this way as soon as possible!
        
       | _ache_ wrote:
       | In France, not only our law are versioned. It's formally proved
       | too!
       | 
       | https://catala-lang.org/
       | 
       | *Edit*: Woah ! The French crew is here. We are at least 5 quoting
       | a variation of <https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/> for versioning.
        
         | allan_s wrote:
         | I find it ironic to have it named "catalan(g)" on a post about
         | spanish law.
        
           | asveikau wrote:
           | Even better. The Catalan word for Catalan is catala. So
           | catala-lang.org fits that too.
        
         | kiliancs wrote:
         | Previous discussion
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177022
        
       | theptip wrote:
       | Nice! I was just implementing this for CA state bills.
       | 
       | Is the parsing/uploading code shared somewhere else?
       | 
       | Definitely the kind of idea that would have been below my
       | activation energy pre-Claude.
       | 
       | I think this approach should be standard, I have always wondered
       | why the source of truth for these documents is not moved to a
       | repo like git.
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | my first reaction cynically would bet that government really
         | doesn't want the people to know exactly what the laws are. a
         | more generous reason would be nobody in law is truly technical
         | enough to understand it let alone implement it.
        
       | ks2048 wrote:
       | A couple things I noticed opening one random page
       | (https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es/blob/master/spain/...)
       | 
       | It left out the tables (e.g. under 2.1 Materiales.) and the
       | images (e.g see the very bottom).
        
       | 8bitsrule wrote:
       | Looks like we're heading toward some resolution to the old
       | problem 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'. Born in a world with
       | plenty of laws, the jeopardy that goes with them, and no easy and
       | reliable resources, that would certainly be welcome.
        
       | makaking wrote:
       | I love this. This made me think that logging all legislation in a
       | public VCS might be a very good way to leverage superintelligence
       | while maintaining democracy. I want this for Germany.
        
       | maCDzP wrote:
       | Nice, I am going to this for Swedish law! Any suggestions on how
       | one can model parliament voting when a law passes using GitHub?
       | Or all the work that preceded a law, that's like a feature
       | request or a bug report.
        
         | setopt wrote:
         | Parliament voting, maybe upvotes and downvotes on a pull
         | request?
        
         | juahan wrote:
         | I started doing it for Finland!
        
         | mrimskog wrote:
         | I've done this for Swedish laws: https://github.com/se-lex/sfs
         | (Markdown with git history)
         | 
         | https://github.com/se-lex/sfs-processor (processor with Git,
         | md, md with temporal tags, or html as output formats)
        
       | sebastianconcpt wrote:
       | We need something like this for every country.
        
       | sandbx wrote:
       | Did you try more heading levels for the article names?
        
       | lcrisci wrote:
       | I love it. This is a step in the right direction to have a
       | transparent database of existing laws and be able to consult them
       | with your AI or anything capable to reason about them and explain
       | the status quo of our national laws. I would love to see a
       | similar setup for other countries.
        
       | boredatoms wrote:
       | Is there something like this for the US?
        
         | wavemode wrote:
         | Even if there were, it wouldn't be very useful. In a "common
         | law" system like the US, legal questions are rarely answered
         | purely by the plain text of a law. You also need case law -
         | that is, how the law is typically applied in practice by the
         | courts.
        
           | boredatoms wrote:
           | Sure, then that with case law too?
        
           | smitty1e wrote:
           | The legislation seems more high-level requirements, that then
           | implemented over in the Code of Federal Regs[1].
           | 
           | Using AI to plow through and make sense of all this would put
           | us at risk of people knowing what the USG is getting up to.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Federal_Regulations
        
         | the-rc wrote:
         | There was a project at Google Chicago to do something like
         | that, around 15 years ago. For some reason, it was never
         | launched.
        
       | sh-cho wrote:
       | Good Idea!
        
       | reality_inspctr wrote:
       | love this. I did something similar w the US Constitution.
       | https://usconstitutionapi.com/
        
       | PhilipV wrote:
       | Well done. I believe that Governments should have a Open Licence
       | for copyright purposes like exists in the UK that allows Govt
       | docs to be used for commercial purposes without issue. I would
       | want to propose a step forward there so that the next generation
       | of this open licence actually has a data set approach to making
       | data sets available - possibly at cost. Governments are losing
       | the ability to charge for nominal items in paper as digital is so
       | openly available - they can make a revenue on providing data at
       | large to public so that others can build or simply if not for
       | free.
       | 
       | Well done and great to see items like this and great to see the
       | comments.
        
         | 0x3f wrote:
         | The UK is IMO quite terrible in this regard. Yes, a lot is OGL,
         | but very key items are sequestered away and very costly to
         | obtain. OGL is a total bodge; just get rid of Crown Copyright.
         | 
         | When it comes to the law specifically, there's a whole silly
         | setup with transcription companies as well.
        
         | postepowanieadm wrote:
         | Legislation is out of copyright. Unofficial consolidated
         | versions may be a different matter.
        
       | wrxd wrote:
       | It would have been cool if the commit authors reflected the
       | actual politicians responsible for the reforms. Find a law, run
       | `git blame` and immediately know who's responsible for it
        
         | deepsun wrote:
         | And even more useful would be unit-tests -- here is a loophole
         | and here is the law preventing it.
         | 
         | Whenever a law is about to be changed/removed, run all the
         | tests to make sure no regressions.
        
           | psychoslave wrote:
           | Jurisdictional laws don't work that way though. It's more
           | like a script for improvised theater. Everybody get the same
           | text, but no one gets the same performance twice.
        
           | ecocentrik wrote:
           | Tests for correctness, self similarity, duplication of
           | concerns, contradictory statutes, edge case detection, cruft
           | or outdated laws that muddy the waters...
           | 
           | If the full compliment of software development practices were
           | applied to legislation and ordinances we would be living in a
           | very different world.
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | oh gawd, code is law is back. or is it law is code?
        
       | pilingual wrote:
       | One idea behind the PoC Right to Privacy Act is having tests. A
       | recurring theme with conservative Justices is clarity of legal
       | text.
       | 
       | Testing may not exhaust all scenarios but it is useful to see
       | where loopholes may exist or whether a bill that sneaks in while
       | you aren't paying attention is unfavorable to your values.
       | 
       | https://github.com/righttoprivacyact/bill/blob/main/tests/te...
        
         | psychoslave wrote:
         | Laws are there to inform the land how the dominant class expect
         | to be served. At least in theory the dominant class could be
         | the working class or the majority, mind you. In practice you
         | generally get a better idea looking at what small network core
         | founded the country, generally through bloody wars or
         | genocides.
        
         | rafram wrote:
         | This is incredibly software engineer-brained. The law doesn't
         | work like software. The only thing that matters is how the
         | judiciary interprets the text, and if you try to use LLM "test"
         | output to argue for a specific interpretation, you'll be
         | laughed out of court.
        
           | pilingual wrote:
           | I believe you hastily misinterpreted the point. It's merely a
           | tool that wasn't possible before.
        
       | LukeB42 wrote:
       | law.py -- A Distributed Legislature:
       | https://gist.githubusercontent.com/float64co/deb887691f13dee...
        
       | matthewgard1 wrote:
       | I did something very similar for some US state level laws.
       | "Legit" legislative git.
       | 
       | Useful for alerts in our concern area, and monitoring proposed
       | legislation iteration and flow through committees to keep ahead.
       | 
       | I can imagine quite a few other more civic interest uses as well!
       | 
       | Hoping to open source some later myself, seems an area ripe for
       | some open civic citizen/hacker projects. Bet some fun startups
       | could be made on top too, gl.
        
       | notorandit wrote:
       | That's how it should be everywhere!
        
       | enriquelop wrote:
       | OP here. Thank you for the incredible response -- I did not
       | expect this.
       | 
       | Many of you asked if the code is shared. It is now:
       | https://github.com/legalize-dev
       | 
       | The pipeline is multi-country by design. France already works as
       | a second country (Legifrance data). Adding a new country means
       | implementing 4 Python interfaces for your national gazette. The
       | rest (markdown, git, web, API) is generic.
       | 
       | I wrote a guide for contributors who want to add their country:
       | https://github.com/legalize-dev/legalize-pipeline/blob/main/...
       | 
       | From this thread alone, people asked about Germany, Portugal,
       | Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, and Brazil. If you know your
       | country's open data source for legislation, a PR is the best way
       | to help.
       | 
       | I'll be honest -- I don't know how much time I'll be able to
       | dedicate to this, but I'd love to build something big.
       | Legislation is massive and scaling to more countries takes real
       | infrastructure. I'm setting up an Open Collective to fund hosting
       | and development: https://opencollective.com/legalize
       | 
       | Live site with browsable laws + diffs: https://legalize.dev
       | 
       | Everything is still very precarious, time to time.
       | 
       | Thank you
        
       | wyan wrote:
       | The fact that the oldest current law in the list is about places
       | where nuns are allowed to be buried is quite amusing, in some
       | sort of way.
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | Heh, with the BOE you need a Common Lisp expert in order to parse
       | _that_. Some legal sentences look like a text from Marx, and not
       | the Commie ones.
        
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