Legix.Info

An Interesting Idea for how to Rethink How we are Governed

This past weekend I came across this interesting block by Abe Voelker. GitLaw: GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents – a Tourniquet for American Liberty. The reaction he got was amazing and totally overwhelmed him.

It’s an interesting read – written by someone naive enough to actually have hope that we could fix our government by applying modern technology. Of course, those of us in the know realize how totally absurd his ideas are. The legislative process is meant to be out of reach the public citizen. It’s meant to keep the common people from meddling in how laws are made. Those people would use normal everyday language that everybody could understand. Too many eyes might spot all the […]

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An HTML5-Based XML Editor for Legislation!

UPDATE: (May 17, 2012) For all the people that asked for more editing capabilities, I have updated the editor to provide rudimentary cut/copy/paste capabilities via the normal shortcut keys. More to follow as I get the cycles to refine the capabilities.

I’ve just released my mini-tutorial for the HTML5-based XML editor I am developing for drafting legislation (actually it’s best for tagging existing legislation at this point).

Please keep in mind that this editor is still very much in development – so its not fully functional and bug-free at this point. But I do believe in being open and sharing what I am working on. We will be using this editor at our upcoming International Legislation Unhackathons (http://legalhacks.org) this coming […]

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Common Identifiers or a Common Data Format. What is more important?

I just read this excellent post by Tom Bruce, et. al. from the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell University Law School.

Tom’s post brought to mind something I have long wrestled with. (Actually so long that it was a key part of my job working on CAD systems in the aerospace industry long ago). I sometimes wonder if having common identifiers isn’t more important than having a common data format. The reason is that being able to unambiguously establish relationships is both very difficult and very useful. In fact, one of the reasons you want a common format is so that you can find and establish these identifiers.

I have used a number of schemes for identifiers over the […]

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Imagine All 50 States Legislation in a Common Format

Last week I expressed dissapointment over NCSL’s opposition to the DATA Act (H.R. 2146). Their reasoning is that the burden this might create on the state’s systems will not be affordable. Contrast this with the topic of the international workshop held in Brussels last week – “Identifying benefits deriving from the adoption of XML-based chains for drafting legislation“. The push toward more transparent government need not be unaffordable.

With that in mind, stop for a while and imagine having the text from all 50 states legislation publishing in a common XML format. Seem like an impossibly difficult and expensive undertaking doesn’t it? With all the requirements gathering, getting systems to cooperate, and getting […]

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The State of the Art in Legislative Editors and the DATA Act

(My plan was for my next blog to contain a mini-tutorial on my editor, that is still coming this weekend)

A report on legislative editors has just been released in Europe. You can find the report at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/document/isa-leos-final-results. It’s a very interesting read. It’s focused on Europe but is something we should look at seriously in the US.

After almost a decade in this business, I discovered my European counterparts a couple years ago when I attended the LEX Summer School in Ravenna, Italy (Info on ths year’s class can be found here) What struck me was how much innovative work was occurring in Europe compared to the USA. Sure we have plenty of XML initiatives in the […]

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Building a Web-Based Legislative Editor

I built the legislative drafting tool used by the Office of the Legislative Counsel in California. It was a long and arduous process and took several years to complete. Issues like redlining, page & line numbers, and the complexities of tables really turned an effort that, while looking quite simple at the surface, into a very difficult task. We used XMetaL as the base tool and customized it from there, developing what has to be the most sophisticated implementation of XMetaL out there. We even had to have a special API added to XMetaL to allow us to drive the change tracking mechanism to support the very specialized redlining needs one finds in legislation.

Using an XML editor allows one to […]

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Toward’s more Affordable Solutions in Legal Informatics – with...

Got six million dollars? That’s the ballpark figure for a complete legislative system and it is too much. A decade ago when the technologies were still new, the risks were high, and experience was scarce, the reasons for this were easily explained. But now it’s time to move beyond the early-adopter market towards a more mature, affordable, and predictable market for legislative systems. The key to moving to this new era is standards.

Towards this end I am participating as a member of the OASIS LegalDocML Technical Committee. Our charter is to develop a common standard for legal documents. We had our initial meeting in March and are defining our deliverables for this important mission.

The wide variety of legal systems and traditions ensures […]

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International Open Standards Hackathon

An international open standard for legislative documents will be an important next step for making legislative information available to the people. An open standard will promote the creation of tools and services worldwide that will enable citizen participation in the legislative process and will enhance how governments make the laws they produce more transparent.

Today there is a great deal of inconsistency in how open participation and transparency are achieved around the world. Putting cultural and political differences aside, part of the reason for the inconsistency is the tremendous effort and cost involved in building the infrastructure to support these new objectives. An open standard will start to solve this problem by promoting the establishment of a real legal informatics industry […]

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International Meeting on Transparency and the use of Open Document Standards

This past week was a very interesting week for me. I attended the meeting “Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures through the Use of Open Document Standards” at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington DC. The meeting was sponsored by the United Nations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

For me it was a valuable opportunity to meet with colleagues I had already met in my travels in recent years, to meet with people I knew of but had never met, and to meet people I had corresponded with only through email. Particularly special for me was to finally meet Tim Arnold-Moore. It was by reading his thesis […]

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And now for something completely different… Chinese!

Last week we saw how Akoma Ntoso can be applied to a very large consolidated Code – the United States Code. This week we take the challenge in a different direction – applying Akoma Ntoso to a bilingual implementation involving a totally different writing system. Our test document this week is the Hong Kong Basic Law. This document serves as the constitutional document of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. It was adopted on the 4 April 1990 and went into effect on July 1, 1997 when the United Kingdom handed over the region to the People’s Republic of China.

The Hong Kong Basic Law is available in English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified […]