The entire US Code is now online in XML

I find it amusing that here in Germany, we have that for years:<p><a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gesetze-im-internet.de&#x2F;</a><p>All laws are available in XML, HTML, PDF, etc. The site also provides an RSS feed.<p>In addition, some enthusiasts regularily download stuff from there and apply those to a Git repository:<p><a href="https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bundestag&#x2F;gesetze</a><p>That way, this repository contains not only the current laws, but also the history of how the laws developed!<p>For the Git repository, the XML version is not used directly, but converted to markdown. This produces very readable diffs:<p><a href="https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze/commit/f90e8fc8eb20f08173e608f493e15f986d7e43ba" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bundestag&#x2F;gesetze&#x2F;commit&#x2F;f90e8fc8eb20f081...</a><p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be cool if we could finally manage our laws of filing pull requests?

I&#x27;m really tempted to collect the XML files and put them on github, with periodic checkpoints to update it with the latest.<p>Watching the evolution of law over time is a fascinating thing and using SW engineering tools to help would be really fun.

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to &#x27;interpret&#x27; this code nondeterministically by many different means including its &#x27;spirit,&#x27; admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately.<p>In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with &quot;it depends,&quot; and start billing.

This is pretty awesome, and if it were in git&#x2F;hg would have the ability to write a &#x27;blame&#x27; tool to figure out who voted on the part of the law that is pissing you off :-)

This actually makes law accessible to the technologically-savvy out there, and is going to launch a thousand apps giving specialized legal advice.<p>This could in turn mean a reduction in the cost of litigation, which would hopefully be passed on to the rest of us.<p>Hopefully I won&#x27;t get sued for that statement.

If you were to start a new country, what would the legislative process look like there? For example, how should new &quot;startup nations&quot; like BlueSeed (<a href="http://blueseed.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blueseed.co</a>) inspired by Seasteading Institute go about passing and storing laws? Should they have some sort of open github repo to which anyone can make pull requests? How do you see the congress of the future?

Doesn&#x27;t appear to include codes and standards which are included by reference such as NFPA, IBC, IRC, SAE, etc. (see [1] for a non-gov&#x27;t project to publish those)<p>Nevertheless it is a very good thing to see the the gov&#x27;t publish (most of) the law in an easy to use format.<p>[1] <a href="https://public.resource.org/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.resource.org&#x2F;</a>

For those of us who don&#x27;t know anything about it, what are the uses of machine readable law?

I&#x27;m probably a little late to the party, but I think it&#x27;s worth mentioning that some of the &quot;XML&quot; looks like this:<p>&lt;tr style=&quot; -uslm-lc:II22; &quot;&gt;&lt;td style=&quot; text-align:left; vertical-align:top; border-right:1px solid black; padding-right:2pt;&quot;&gt;&lt;p style=&quot; text-align:left; text-indent: -1em; padding-left:1em;&quot;&gt;<p>Wow. I wonder what -uslm-lc does.

It&#x27;s tragic that the United States (Federal) Legislative Model (USLM) is defined in terms of W3C XML Schema Definition language (XSD) instead of the comparably sane RELAX NG and its easily interpreted compact syntax. You would think that something this important ought to be made clear and understandable.<p>EDITED TO CLARIFY: The tragic part isn&#x27;t that the schema is <i>given</i> in XSD but that it&#x27;s <i>defined</i> in XSD, which lacks RELAX NG&#x27;s simple semantics and composibility rules. For a good summary of what I&#x27;m referring to, see James Clark&#x27;s message to the IETF on the subject:<p><a href="http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-use/mail-archive/msg00217.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imc.org&#x2F;ietf-xml-use&#x2F;mail-archive&#x2F;msg00217.html</a>

An alternative XML version of the US Code from Cornell Law School: <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/wiki/lexcraft/united_states_code_in_xml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;lexcraft&#x2F;united_states_code_...</a>

This reminds me of a recent discussion where someone mentioned tools over process. (<a href="http://rc3.org/2013/07/29/seven-signs-of-dysfunctional-engineering-teams/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rc3.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;seven-signs-of-dysfunctional-engin...</a>)<p>I would say that the &#x27;law&#x27; is just subjective manual process, and we desperately need more tools for every-day judgement and decision making.<p>For example, if there were a computer system that logged all corporate financial transactions including income, then we could automatically tax large corporations, rather than waiting for them to report income through loopholes.

This information has been available for a long time on plainsite:<p><a href="http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?corpusid=3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org&#x2F;laws&#x2F;index.html?corpusid=3</a>

I&#x27;m attempting to centralize many different sets of laws on PlainSite:<p><a href="http://www.plainsite.org/laws" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plainsite.org&#x2F;laws</a><p>Feel free to contribute.

now if the same could be provided for bills(ideally before they are voted on), and that should go in github or something.

Since this is hacker news, I was curious to see which code the subject was talking about and surprisingly not the code I was thinking of. I wonder how much more of this gov code has actually been read by the people in all those countries where it&#x27;s been available longer.

Putting something online is very different than actually getting meaning out of it. I&#x27;m afraid that this will push us towards more laws rather than less. But... Perhaps there will be good machine learning apps that can make sense out of all the contradictions.

This is awesome. They even have a stylesheet apparently.<p>However though the file claims to be UTF-8, vim seems to disagree, at least for title 10. I can&#x27;t tell what encoding it really <i>is</i> though, doesn&#x27;t seem to be latin1 or windows-1252 either.

The developer friendly RESTful version: <a href="https://www.mashape.com/community/united-states-code#!documentation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mashape.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;united-states-code#!docume...</a>

Does anyone know what software is used by the hill staffers when drafting new bills? How do they make sure that the laws do not contradict each other?

I can&#x27;t wait to look for the law whereby Congress established a church in violation of the Establishment Clause. But no one complained.

I&#x27;m annoyed that Title 38 - Veteran&#x27;s Benefits is out of alphabetical order. Was it originally called Pensions or something?

The USC has been available in HTML or ASCII for many years. From house.gov, gpo.gov and cornell.edu, to name a few sources.

In case anyone was wondering, it&#x27;s about 80MB zipped, 500MB unzipped.

Does anyone know how people search this now and how much it costs?

repo with the contents of the house.gov site: <a href="https://github.com/peterkinnaird/US-Code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;peterkinnaird&#x2F;US-Code</a>

Portugal should do this to their civil code!!!

Except for the secret laws, of course...

does that mean these are all the current federal laws?..

Genuinely curious - how can this data be used from a software perspective?

XML? this should be in json!