We've built the Open Law Platform that governments can use to do this with their official laws. We just launched with the Maryland Secretary of State last month at regs.maryland.gov. You can see the "source code" at https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-xml, and the "compiled" code at any point in time since they started using our system at https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-xml-codified and https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law-html. All cryptographically signed at https://github.com/maryland-dsd/law.
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html
An article on the story: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...
(fwiw I didn't think that piece hit the nail on the head even though it was generally swinging a hammer in the direction of a nail)
the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more profound, are what i mean by the law.
The reminder that there’s structure and content and they’re different is a good one. Even a small legal document has this microstructure of references, inside, outside explicitly and outside by inference.
(Even if it's only to argue that they aren't all that different in practice.)
I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."
I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?
IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that.
Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.
Where and how? Pretty sure our Federal and State Governments here in Australia publish the current in-force law (original Act amended with all amendments) - I assumed that was normal, do they not do that elsewhere?
See for example the Telecommunications Act (1997) [1] but current version amended to October 2025 (the most recent amendment). Then you click ‘All Versions’ and you can read any of the 116 or so versions back to the original in 1997.
1. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A05145/latest/text 2. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A05145/latest/versions
Let’s say you have tax law and the particular law is thousands of paragraphs long. You have multiple changes to the law going on at the same time (totally unrelated stuff in different parts of the law). It’s going to be really hard now because each of the 15 changes need to update its own texts as soon as any other of the proposals get changed and it’s going to affect exactly which order they are voted on etc.
Much easier to just say propasal A changes paragaraph 33 and proposal B changes paragraph 475
Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.
* Laws of the Land
* Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Final 2
* Copy of Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29 with 11 o' clock amendments
IMO a good middle ground could be attained by everyone having some understanding of the legal system. we could use school for that. i mean, we cover calculus and ancient history, it's not like covering law to some extent would be harder
The approach I take is that every law should expire after a standard, unchangeable time - probably several terms of Congress, say 6 years to account for one full Senate turnover.
Congress can just repass verbatim old laws if they wish - its already written and can be a simple, fast vote. Or we can have debate over outdated provisions like we should have.
Here is an example: https://jogkodex.hu/jsz/kftv_2013_87_torveny_5995373?r=25
You can check the state of this law at any point in time and even highlight the differences.
I assumed it is so in every civil law country and the law is only unknowable in common law countries where basically every previous court decision is part of the law in some way and they contradict and it becomes a skill and game of twisting words and digging up obscure precedents.
Which countries don't have it? Is it a civil law country?
Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.
I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!