How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

From the Why It Matters section:<p><i>The Council is able to publish the law better and faster than ever before. With the District’s previous codification contractor, updates to the DC Code were published three times a year, and there could be a five-to-seven month delay in seeing the latest laws. But the Open Law Library has shortened the publication process to about a week after a law is enacted.<p>It also means we’re all getting to see more of the actual law that governs us—not the law as it was months ago.</i>

&gt; My edit wasn’t substantive. This sort of “technical correction,” as lawyers would call it, didn’t need to be passed by the Council and signed by the Mayor.<p>Okay, so they didn&#x27;t &quot;change the law.&quot; It&#x27;s a cool story but not a fan of clickbait titles either.

Hi all, I&#x27;m a co-founder of Open Law Library, the non-profit that built the platform DC uses to codify and publish their laws. We were so excited when we saw a member of the public make a PR. I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions.

This is such a great way of making access to the law more open and welcoming, which is a great thing to me!<p>I haven&#x27;t been able to check yet, but does anyone know if you are allowed to use this process to propose new laws or clarifications of laws more substantial than simple typo fixes?<p>Sure, you aren&#x27;t going to have non-lawyers crafting legislation, but could this be used to bring up clarifications that could impact rulings or increase&#x2F;decrease scope of current laws or something similar? (I&#x27;m not a lawyer, so I don&#x27;t know what are big and what are small changes here)<p>Imagine if proposed laws could be commented on, have changes offered, debated, and ultimately decided on in an open fashion like this! With a public &quot;audit trail&quot; of sorts showing the history of changes the law went through.<p>I know this is optimistic, but I wholeheartedly believe that more openness and more people involved will ultimately lead to better laws.

In stark contrast to Georgia, which has actively made access to its laws harder through copyright enforcement.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;appeals-court-tells-georgia-state-code-cant-be-copyrighted" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;appeals-court-tells-ge...</a>

On one side it makes sense to have a public repository like git used for this, but having a private company being responsible for this it&#x27;s bit strange.<p>The fact that a pull request was accepted was now that strange because it could have been done by the council representative.<p>For this kind of use case it would make more sense to me some sort of block chain, not controlled by a single company.<p>&quot;This isn’t a copy of the DC law. It is an authoritative source. It is where the DC Council stores the digital versions of enacted laws, and this source feeds directly into the Council’s DC Code website at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.dccouncil.us&#x2F;dc&#x2F;council&#x2F;code&#x2F;.&quot;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.dccouncil.us&#x2F;dc&#x2F;council&#x2F;code&#x2F;.&quot;</a>

This is great, I would also love to see laws have applicable test cases created. For a practical example, in NJ they recently changed gun laws, and they forgot to include an exemption for police officers, so they ended up being restricted by the new laws the same way civilians are. (I really bit my tongue on this, not going to get political, here).<p>The law should have had a test case created, which would have the equivalent of ensuring that police officers are not in violation of the law, when they are serving active duty, or going home. NJ’s assembly had to rush in some middle of the night legislation to fix this “bug” in the law, that nobody caught.<p>I would love to see this applied to all laws. As the article states, software and law have a lot in common. Testing should be one of them.

A few years ago, while the French parliament was discussing the modifications in law to allow gay marriage, many people were scrutinizing amendments and proposed amendment, and a developer presented all the MPs work in a git repository. It really felt like the future of democracy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;steeve&#x2F;france.code-civil&#x2F;commit&#x2F;dfd5918f90025e15eecd72daff912b547433daed?diff=split" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;steeve&#x2F;france.code-civil&#x2F;commit&#x2F;dfd5918f9...</a>

It&#x27;s great that DC is making their latest laws available to everyone, however it&#x27;s a little scary that the commits aren&#x27;t signed, meaning that anyone who gained access to the github repo could forge them (and do more than fixing typos).<p>Hopefully DC (and others) will look at doing GPG signatures[0,1] so that they don&#x27;t have to trust github&#x27;s authentication as much. Github has a nice GUI that reflects signatures with the &quot;Verified&quot; tag, which you can see at[2].<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git-scm.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;en&#x2F;v2&#x2F;Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git-scm.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;en&#x2F;v2&#x2F;Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;signing-commits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;signing-commits&#x2F;</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;QubesOS&#x2F;qubes-doc&#x2F;commits&#x2F;master" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;QubesOS&#x2F;qubes-doc&#x2F;commits&#x2F;master</a>

This is neat as long as DC sticks to a policy of open source laws and free access. Github has always done this, but I fear that 50 years from now we could be in a situation like access to case law where you have to pay a third party to read.

Someone make a site that has French laws in GitLab <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr&#x2F;articles.html?loi=pjl12-689" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr&#x2F;articles.html?loi=pjl12-689</a>

Is this type of thing something people want?<p>I have been thinking of running for local office (one seat in particular is always uncontested), and my platform would basically be: I&#x27;ll set up a method for constituents to voice their opinion in a transparent way. I&#x27;m thinking something like change.org, but with some way to verify residency.<p>I think citizens don&#x27;t get as involved as they want to because the barrier to entry is too high and the results are too opaque (don&#x27;t know how many called, emailed, etc). I would <i>love</i> to start a movement for more open government, but I&#x27;m just not sure the demand is there.

I wrote this a while ago: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kmeme.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;healthcare-diff.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kmeme.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;healthcare-diff.html</a><p>I wonder how well code-style line-oriented diffs work for laws. If you word wrap then your single-line changes can cascade and effect many lines. If you don’t word wrap seems like you need a better way to see diffs within long lines. Seems totally solvable, but that what github does for code might not be right.<p>But this is so awesome, pull requesting a typo. Go DC really forward thinking.

My side gig, like most sites these days, publishes a privacy policy and terms of service. From the start, I published those documents in a public Git repository - it provides a clear source of what version was in force at the time of any given argument. When you might later be discussing the content of those documents in court, that can be essential.<p>Of course, it could also work against you, but either way, it&#x27;s one less thing that&#x27;s open for discussion.

While this is a great development, hosting AUTHORITATIVE text of the law at a private service (GitHub, owned by Microsoft) doesn&#x27;t sound like a good idea.<p>Consider what would happen if Microsoft decided to delete the repo. There will still be copies of the law at different places, but there would no authoritative version. Imagine a lawsuit where each party is arguing that their copy of the law is the &quot;correct&quot; one.

I always reach that website when I randomly hit my keyboard in the browser&#x27;s address bar to see if my internet connection is working.<p>Seems to be a great domain.<p>(Colemak user here)

If the law is on github, does Microsoft then own the law?

I&#x27;ve been wanting this for a long time, I wanted to take it further though:<p>I want draft laws, I want to see all representatives as contributors and be able to see their contributions and changes to draft laws.<p>the House should have a master branch that submits pull requests to another repository, the other chamber having one too<p>The Governor&#x2F;President gets to approve PR&#x27;s from that jurisdiction<p>It would become SUPER easy to track origins and changes of laws, let alone browse them, and comment on them.<p>I&#x27;d like to see this done retroactively all the way back to English law

The only relevant link on the article <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DCCouncil&#x2F;dc-law-xml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DCCouncil&#x2F;dc-law-xml</a>

So by hacking GitHub, now laws can be changed?<p>I want sentences to be GitHub as well, so that an inmate can hack github to change his sentence.

I’m personally not OK with a system that enables a single individual (the &quot;lawyer&quot; in the article) to declare modification to a law as insubstantial, then modify the law.<p>Some review process needs to be there, and frankly, even a typo correction IMO needs to be run by the Mayor because she&#x2F;he signed one thing into law and this process changes what they signed. We cannot ever assume we know the intent of the Chief Executive, even when “obviously” in error.<p>OTOH, a diff system for law is awesome. California uses a similar system but it is cumbersome to do things like “show me how this section evolved over time”.