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  kfogel
  NYT, 2007:"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )
• codingdave
  I've been working with government entities for document management for 15 years now, writing software that does exactly what we are talking about - versioning, tracking, publishing legislative records both through the authoring and approval cycles and then to the public. I have not worked at the federal level, but with small government - school districts, small towns etc.Those years tell me 2 things:1) Yes, absolutely version control for legislation is critical.2) That doesn't mean Git is the right answer.Since I don't work at the federal level, I don't know what system they use, but I do know that their workflow is already based on specific changes - they will write up the changes to a document, then apply the changes and publish a new document. Those documents are posted on congress.gov. So they do have a versioning workflow and public accessibility, just not the same style as software devs are used to. I'm sure it could be improved, but I'm not sure forcing them into our working style is the right answer.The real goal here is not "Use Git". That is an implementation detail, and one that has also been presented and discussed quite a bit in my niche of the industry. Mostly, it is unwanted. Or was unwanted the last time the discussion went around. Git makes sense to software engineers, but not to the general public, and not to any of the document authors I've worked with. Maybe we can add a UX layer to fix that, but that isn't the bigger point...What we want is to work towards the actual goals: For the tracking to be more detailed, with more transparency including not only authorship of the change, but the source of the change. And presumably, some commentary as to why the change was made. Then all of that should be available to the public.If git works as a data structure that supports a solution that meets those goals, fine. I'm not anti-git. But when designing solutions, we need to start from the goals of the system, not the data layer. And we need to design solutions that the document authors will actually use, not force them to work like us.
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  Ericson2314
  The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.
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  TomAbel
  Reminds me of a similar project for french lawFrench bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/"Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May 2014 (0 comments)
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  pcblues
  I hadn't thought of using git to track the changes in legislation. This is a cool idea.In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation.So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean."A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
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  demibabs
  When I read AI-generated text, my eyes just start glazing over… it really is hard to read.The idea is cool though.
• aizk
  If you're like me and also eager for cool uses for git, I'll share a cool one I use -- try out git for your resume! Commits change as you progress in life, and make branches for individually tailored resumes.Blew my mind when I realized I could do that.
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  scronkfinkle
  I've been working on this problem for several months now: https://www.wordstodata.com/A surprising amount of tracking and diffing in legal texts is actually very different to git. It's a trap to assume software version control fits the needs for legal work.
• anon
  undefined
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  burnJS
  I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.
• ekns
  I'm doing this as open source for all amendment-driven law for the world. Finnish/Estonian law basically solved now but US/UK are a lot more complex to do correctly for some reason.Now major version coming within 1 month probably with many architectural changes. The thesis is that it's basically all doable as a compiler but there may be certain cases which are irreducibly ambiguous and need human/AI to adjudicate them. The rest must be deterministic.https://github.com/eliask/lawvm
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  mushufasa
  I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post some of that context.
• holtwick
  German Constitution "Grundgesetz" on Github with proper time stamps https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz
• barrrrald
  Cool idea but I can't find anywhere on the linked page to try it? It reads like a neat concept but it's not clear if this is a thing they've actually made or not (or am I just missing something super obvious?)
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  LPisGood
  Wow! This is very cool. I had an idea for something very similar to this when I found out the US federal government offered API keys, maybe three or four years ago. I found that while Congress did list bill revisions as they were made the format and retrieval of these was not an easy task. The idea was that I wanted to look at any line of any bill and see who proposed it that particular line’s inclusion.For the record, and feel free to steal it if you like it, I called it “G(overnm)it-blame”
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  7kago_yomi
  Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.
• nico
  I love this, and I feel every legal document (of which there are many, for example, a random one: insurance companies' policies) should have something like this (and no, Word is not good for it)Does it already exist?
• timwis
  DC did this years ago, too: https://github.com/DCCouncil/law-xmlSomeone set it up for Philly and Baltimore too, but I can't seem to find it.
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  xlayn
  YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to appear and hope they share the torrent...
• cco
  Given that chicken scratch in the margins gets into bills that are voted upon, it seems unlikely that this would be accepted by Congress. Love it though.
• zoobab
  I proposed Git and Markdown instead of XML for EU law making in the European Parliament, they went with their own custom web editor to manupilate XML. And failed.
• alancm
  there's such a system that's been deployed in various jurisdictions in the US called the archive framework: https://github.com/openlawlibrary/tafit was built by academics deeply familiar with the security and usability of git and secure tools.
• bad_username
  Law is programs running on humans.
• alanwreath
  I wonder if there are any public sources for any of this data at a federal level? And do any of them still hold the older now versions?
• omoikane
  See also:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625366 - United States Code (federal laws) in Git (2026-04-03, 15 comments)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591 - Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub (2026-04-02, 32 comments)I think it's parsing this data:https://uscode.house.gov/download.htmlWhich was discussed here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135504 - The entire US Code is now online in XML (2013-07-31, 237 comments)
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  adamdennis
  Wasn’t this one of the original pitches for blockchain?
• jcranmer
  I think it's useful to link to a lawyer's take on the utility of a similar tool that was built by somebody else here: https://bsky.app/profile/questauthority.bsky.social/post/3mj...The tl;dr is that doing git-style change-tracking of the legislation isn't as helpful in practice as you'd think (especially because a lot of the very basic change-tracking is already available in the existing tools that lawyers use!).
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  layla5alive
  Being able to git blame politicians and such would be very useful indeed (at first..) :-)
• AustinDev
  AI explainer videos are actually pretty good. Good usage.
• counters
  Major party foul for not calling this "legitslate"
• yieldcrv
  I put a lot of thought into this last decade, I find that some bills are big blocks of new text, and other bills are convoluted instructions to modify other blocks of existing law, sometimes saying "strike this word and that word" other times referencing just a subsection of another law. hyperlinks to that other law or a model of what the legal code would look like is necessaryAgentically this could be done now, but it would still just be the tip of the icebergYou're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and that's just for one jurisdiction
• NoMoreNicksLeft
  Without 64-bit time though, can't use it historically. Since current legislation is always changes built upon legislation from long before unix epoch, it kind of falls flat.
• nomilk
  Brilliant! Now do it for companies' T&Cs please!
• bottled_poe
  > Deepseek, refactor this repo to simplify the code. Make no mistakes.
• ericfrederich
  ... And the tax code written in Python
• iAMkenough
  Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be responsible for.If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.
• z3674313
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• fr2029r
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• sundayexport
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• miltonlaxer
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• orliesaurus
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• reserve
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• infogulch
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• lily121
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  octoberfranklin
  Fraudulent title, you can't git-clone this.
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  noja
  It’s a nice idea, but isn’t it a bit pointless if the law is not being applied?