"Following a 1999 feasibility study on XML/SGML, the Committee on House Administration adopted XML as a data standard for the exchange of legislative documents" http://uscodebeta.house.gov/download/resources/USLM-User-Gui...

It took the US Govt 17 years to release 200,000 pages of the US code in XML.

XML is a superior format for semantically marking up content from a very detail-oriented dataset like this.

Heck they didn't even bother to include a way to inherit styles, they are just included in every case.

The Australian Constitution in section 55 forbids tax and spending legislation to deal with any other subject. If an Act includes other material, it's void, it has no effect.

This prevents the American situation of omnibus bills, rider amendments and the like.

We still get pork barrelling here; but between S 55, fused executive and legislative and strict party discipline, the political incentives are differently structured for individual politicians. It creates a stronger check on profligacy.

Yep. Or you give yourself a new constitution and say "All laws previously in force automatically come into force, unless they contradict the new constitution". Ireland did that.

Likewise Ireland cleared out a lot of old laws in the 200X's. It was done by saying "Anything pre-1922 is repealed unless it's on this list".

I'm unsure why they kept some laws, like the 1204 law on "Erection of castle and fortifications at Dublin; establishment of fairs at Donnybrook,Waterford and Limerick", but at least now we can refer to it as the Fairs Act of 1204....

Australian Parliaments do it, so clearly it's not a great impediment to lawmaking.

"Remove pages 123.4 - 123.6 and replace with pages 123.4a-123.7."

Later, when I learned about diffs, I understood the concept immediately.

Someone needs to take the plunge and start writing the program; throw it on Github and tell us all about it. I know people who are looking for such a tool.

Of course. It's hard to deny that you killed someone if you killed them in self-defense. And that's why there is value is having law be interpreted on a case-by-case basis. The judiciary could determine, because it was self-defense per your examples, that you didn't "technically break the law" because the law as worded is weak. This is the iterative nature of developing laws. If too many people were found to not be breaking the law as written after review, then the laws, and the wording thereof, should be updated to account for that by being more explicit and producing less grey area.

You can do word diffs with git:

    git diff --word-diff=color

as far as words in lines, you do have a point.

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

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

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

If nothing prevents you, you ought to throw this up for others to see. Worst comes to worst, no one finds it useful.

Although it seems like there is also the accretion of "legalistic debt" (c.f. technical debt) when changes are made in response to (the perception of) urgent, high-profile problems.

It seems that, much like software, it's a lot easier to add clauses to, or make minor changes to existing laws than it is to write a new, much simpler version that would cover all the same ground, get it passed, and repeal the older version.

I'm also curious about what effect changes to a particular law have on precedent based on an interpretation of an older version.

Not having certain laws trivially prevent abuse of such laws - if there's no law prohibiting possession of certain plant, cops can not extort somebody in possession of such plant, can not hide such plant in somebody's vehicle in order to incriminate them, can not force one to perform illegal acts threatening that otherwise they'd be found guilty in possession of such plant, can not seize one's home, vehicle or money because they suspected him in possessing a prohibited plant. This made possible only by existence of the law that makes certain behavior a crime. If less behaviors are made a crime or deemed worthy of government intervention, less complex laws will be needed and less abuse of these laws will be possible - you can only abuse a law that gives you a power over somebody, but you can not abuse law that does not exist.

If you go to a restaurants where only thing that is preventing them from being rat-infested is government I suggest changing you patronage to a better place. Your home, I suppose, is not rat-infested, yet how often the government checks it? Somehow you manage to keep rats out of your home without the government, don't you? Why do you think everybody else can't do the same? Are they, unlike you, lack some important parts in their brains that allow them to function independently? I doubt it.

>>> At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

Marketplace is by definition a voluntary interaction, and participants in voluntary interaction can claim abuse only in one case - when one of the parties were fraudulent and did not deliver their end of the bargain. In this case, indeed, the government needs to step in and enforce the deal - or provide some other satisfactory resolution. But that's not what current law code is doing, it is very far from it. It actually tries to mold the marketplace into the shape and form that politicians prefer, and that's where most of the abuses come from.

          [-Section 2 of act-]{+Act+} July 30, 1947, ch. 392, {+Sec. 2,+} 61 Stat. 674, provided that

> Ever heard of reviews?

You missed my point: Transparency. A restaurant may get rave reviews and still have a filthy, dangerous kitchen. It's what we, as consumers, don't have access to that matters.

> So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

This is a ridiculous non sequitur. I was arguing that companies obviously could not self-police, since they are doing bad things all the time even with state policing; how is your reply relevant?

>>> Secondly, even then, all you can do is disseminate information. You can't enforce anything

You mean - you can't stop people from buying what they want even if you think it's bad for them, you can only give them information and let them decide for themselves if they're ok with it? Oh horror!!!

So, I agree with your argument. It's all very situation dependent. For some reason I find it oddly comforting that human society and life in general can't be crammed into a small set of fixed rules. That would be kind of boring I think.

[1]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw3Stat5/25/2

We want law that prevents criminals from breaking into banks and stealing your cash, but what we got was a law able to be used to persecute young people to the point of suicide for accessing an "open" system belonging to an educational establishment.

The laws we have now cannot do what they claim to do without being impossibly broad or impossible to implement. As was was discussed elsewhere today, the joke of a "Do what I mean" button, is that nobody, in fact, knows what they mean, and this goes exponentially so for a congress of 500 or so people.

Legislation is not the only source of law.

That said, more structured analysis is no bad thing. But it's not a panacea either. There's an existing analytical mechanism for legislation: depending on where you are, it's called "Parliament" or "Congress".

To participate, you must first be elected to that body. Or work for someone who does.

Half the people whose valuables are in that safe find it perfectly adequate and would insist that any attempt to change the locks is just a blatant attempt to grab their money.

Ha! No.

* do you want to give an exemption for speeding for, say, ambulances? So how do you define "ambulance"? Do you have to be registered to drive an ambulance? What defines the "duty of an ambulance" (or are they allowed to speed no matter what). What about a van carrying an organ to be donated?

* What if I have my sick child in the car and I'm rushing them to the hospital because it's faster than waiting for an ambulance? Is it right that I can be arrested and convicted for that? I think that would be a perversion of the spirit of any just law.

* What if I'm being chased by a maniac relative who wants to kill me? Can I speed then to drive away from them? Do I have to believe my life is in danger? How do you define that?

* Let's pretend I'm driving along and some other vehicle is about to move into my lane and crash into me because they are stupid and don't see me, and let's pretend that if I speed up a little bit (over the speed limit) and am able to get in front of them and avoid an accident. Should I be convictable for speeding even though I sped to prevent an accident?

Sure, these are all edge cases and there are loads of cases where it is clear cut, but you have to write a law that can handle the edge cases. Without accepting the vagueness of human life, you'll wind up with an unfair conviction that is horrible.

I'm not suggesting that laws should be passed that work this way within a framework that assumes they don't. The solution to a mountain of bad code is not to add another layer that tries to make huge changes; it's to rearchitect. I also understand that this isn't going to happen in a large existing system like the US; I think it's a better way, but there's no easy, incremental path from here to there.

As for your hypothetical: In this system, since the vast majority of penalties would be monetary, or have monetary equivalents, and since the entire damage is (supposed to be) captured by the penalty, ambulance companies would come up with their own rules under which they would pay fines on behalf of their drivers, contractually. The market could then correct via abuse of those rules by the driver, or refusal of drivers to work for that ambulance company, depending on which way the rules erred.