"TeraText for Legislation"[1] has done this, specifically point in time reconstruction per amendments, for a couple of decades.
It uses a very 90s set of technologies, esp. XML, and is the golden source for legislation is a number of places around the world.
It is/was a very consulant-driven product and tightly coupled to a "secret sauce" database backend that no one really wants to use, but still, kind of cool.
"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."
Every system gets gamed, and so is the current one. The goal is that the people can more easily stay informed. Even with mixed authors problem you highlight would be still an improvement.
Git does allow multiple contributors on each commit. Of course people can lie, but it's a matter of policy in the end. Make it a crime to not add all contributors to a diff.
There are a million frontends designed to simplify Git for non-programmers. In fact, lots of office software now has version management built-in. Very few people use it. This isn’t a technology problem.
We don’t need version control for legislative bills. We need journalists that track down who tried to insert what, summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in technicalities.
Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.
We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else doing the type of research you just described this makes it faster and easier.
In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.
For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.
I am confused. Someone put in place a system that would allow journalists or citizens to meaningfully engage with the law in a much better way than they can now.
However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.
If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?
Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?
Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and benefits.
A revision control system is a tool the journalists could use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could have commit messges documenting the context (when, how, why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the same amount of meta data.
Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.
> it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors
You’d just got a system of favors for who inserts what language. You’d hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for own comms.
When a measure becomes a target yada yada.
(Note: this proposal is for the U.S. code. Not bills. Git for the USC works.)
Such a requirement would not do what you think it would. There would not be names legislator or even aids as commit authors. The commit authors would be members of the House Office of the Legislative Counsel[1].
The House Office of the Legislative Counsel is non-partisan, impartial, and confidential. Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan. Is more partisanship in government not a concern?
The second issue with transparency is that communication between legislators and legislative counsel member is subject to the attorney-client relationship. Breaking attorney-client privilege is a serious decision. Knowing how such a change would affect the organization and its members is not something to be taken lightly.
A more convincing argument for transparency would address impartiality and confidentiality. This is pretty clearly a Chesterton's fence type situation where advocating to change a system should anticipate criticisms. Addressing opposition preemptively is an implicit demonstration of knowing why the system exists which is table stakes for changing it.
I'm doing this as open source for all amendment-driven law for the world.
Finnish/Estonian law basically solved now but US/UK are a lot more complex to do correctly for some reason.
Now major version coming within 1 month probably with many architectural changes. The thesis is that it's basically all doable as a compiler but there may be certain cases which are irreducibly ambiguous and need human/AI to adjudicate them. The rest must be deterministic.
The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.
It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.
>> The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.
> I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.
The US government works for the people and, as such, changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable, discoverable, and therefore justifiable by or condemnable to those who are responsible for said changes without fear or favor.
Poland has an official, somewhat manual version of this - the ISAP system.
Actual bills are written in the form of patches ("§1. In the law X paragraph 5, the words "such and such" are replaced with "this and that". §2. The law X paragraph 4 is striked. §3. After law X paragraph 8, a new paragraph 8a is added that says "etc. and so on".)
After a patch or a collection of patches are passed, they are combined together and a unified version of the law is published. These documents aren't technically the law, they just show a snapshot of what the law is at the specific moment.
ISAP system is an online collection of all bills that were passed, plus crosslinks between laws that change/supercede/otherwise interact with each other, plus current and archival unified versions, plus related administrative orders and other miscellanious documents. Makes looking up laws and changes to laws very easy.
First PDF is the original, second PDF is the unified version, then there's links - 4 others changed, 4 explicitly obsoleted, 12 implicitly obsolete, 707 administrative orders, 12 Constitutional Tribunal rulings, 11 previous + current unified versions, 212 patches, 14 relevant EU directives.
I hadn't thought of using git to track the changes in legislation. This is a cool idea.
In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation.
So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean.
"A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
> In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation.
That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only targeting federal level, but could also include state level
The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over
> "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
Same. I don't know if it's the word choices or just me recognizing it as AI and subconsciously feeling cheated.
As an aside, my city FB group(small town, basically the local forum and news) has been absolutely flooded with AI 'flyers', and I have the same reaction. I can't put my finger on the exact reason, maybe the busy-ness, but they're repelling to my eyes.
Luckily after about 6 months of this now they're starting to get heavy pushback.
If you're like me and also eager for cool uses for git, I'll share a cool one I use -- try out git for your resume! Commits change as you progress in life, and make branches for individually tailored resumes.
A surprising amount of tracking and diffing in legal texts is actually very different to git. It's a trap to assume software version control fits the needs for legal work.
Given that chicken scratch in the margins gets into bills that are voted upon, it seems unlikely that this would be accepted by Congress. Love it though.
I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.
Transparency has a cost. There are several good reasons, but my favorite is intellectual freedom. Policy makers would be much less likely to explore bold reforms or risky bipartisan compromises if their draft quality notes and correspondences were publicly tied to their political reputation. It takes significant work to produce successful legislation, and much of that work can be productively and safely done without direct public oversight. This is the same reason an individual might value a private journal.
If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it. They will certainly have a reason. Tell them if you disagree, and vote when you can.
> Policy makers would be much less likely to explore bold reforms or risky bipartisan compromises if their draft quality notes and correspondences were publicly tied to their political reputation.
Only if those bold reforms weren't in the interests of the people they serve. Risky bipartisan compromises should still be transparent along with what was gained in exchange for them. If the people feel that the compromise wasn't worth it they should be empowered to vote accordingly come election time. It's the job of representatives to assure the people who elected them that they are doing a good job and if they can't do that they deserve to lose their position. Refusing to support bold reforms that the people they represent want, or refusing to compromise when it would be beneficial to voters would become just as costly to their career.
> It takes significant work to produce successful legislation, and much of that work can be productively and safely done without direct public oversight.
Often most of that work is done entirely for them by corporations and lobbying groups and "law makers" just vote how they are paid to vote without even reading the bill put before them. Just because something can be done in secrecy doesn't make that the ideal way to do it. We've have extremely poor results with the system as it stands right now, so a change to introduce more transparency and accountability seems like a very good idea.
> This is the same reason an individual might value a private journal.
A public servant representing the people by making edits to laws and performing the duties they were elected to carry out is nothing at all like someone keeping a private journal. Their work is not their personal affairs, it is the public's affairs. How that work is being done matters to the public. Legislators would still remain free to go home at the end of the day and write in their private diary all they like.
> If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it.
When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind closed doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold them accountable for it, which is exactly why it takes place in secrecy. Increasing the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable by increasing transparency can only improve outcomes for voters, and it would certainty be inconvenient for elected officials who want to put their own interests above the interests of the people who elected them.
Likewise, a younger, more idealistic me thought it'd be great to use a GitHub-esque platform for laws. Pull Requests to suggest laws, gated behind reviews/approvals, branches so each house could work on their own versions before finally reconciling and merging into the Code, literally.
Cool idea but I can't find anywhere on the linked page to try it? It reads like a neat concept but it's not clear if this is a thing they've actually made or not (or am I just missing something super obvious?)
Wow! This is very cool. I had an idea for something very similar to this when I found out the US federal government offered API keys, maybe three or four years ago. I found that while Congress did list bill revisions as they were made the format and retrieval of these was not an easy task. The idea was that I wanted to look at any line of any bill and see who proposed it that particular line’s inclusion.
For the record, and feel free to steal it if you like it, I called it “G(overnm)it-blame”
I proposed Git and Markdown instead of XML for EU law making in the European Parliament, they went with their own custom web editor to manupilate XML. And failed.
I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post some of that context.
Something akin to this is a big part of the products that companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters charge your lawyers a whole lot of money for. Because for a lot of legal questions, you don't just need to know what the law says now, but what it said at the time of the incident in question. And every legislative body around the country (at least at the time I was working in this space a decade ago) publishes legislative changes in completely different and often times not easily parsable forms. Web scraping and PDF scraping was far more common than you'd think. Some state legislatures published changes in more reasonable forms, and some states contract their official legislative compilation to companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters and work to publish an actual change stream with proper standardized references. There's a lot of manual work that goes into making stuff like this work, a lot of lawyers and other legal professionals manually reviewing that the right pieces were removed or added in the right places, matching up references to parts of the law that might have changed between the time the legislation was passed and the time the change was published and figuring out what order everything actually goes in. And the actual text of the law is only part of the equation. Legal decisions from courts can dramatically impact the reading of the law, or effect effectively strike laws from the books (even if the laws are technically still on the books, just not enforceable). So often the right way to represent a diff of two points in time depends on the question you're trying to answer.
I wanted to do something like this for a single section in Washington law, to show why a particular funding restriction had been added, but was no longer achieving the intended goal. Git alone wasn't enough of a UI, because the 'why' was only in the introductory text of the bill that changed the law, and not in the law itself - and then there was the move of that article to a different section, and a re-numbering of sections, and a change in definition in a different section that affected the scope of this one... fascinating stuff!
I thought legal document versioning software would cover some of these problems but it doesn't seem like a similar enough process.
Following renumbers has to be one of the worst parts of this. As an example, the text of the US code that was modified by the BCRA in 2002 has been renumbered / moved since Citizens United v FEC was decided. But the text itself is the same as it was since the BCRA passed, because courts don't remove the actual law text with their decisions. So if you want to know what parts of the current US code were ruled unconstitutional by the courts in that decision and are therefore unenforceable, you need to first find the text of the BCRA, because the ruling refers to the sections of that piece of legislation. Then you need to find the version of the US code that was on the books when the BCRA was passed to find the section references that the law talks about. Then you need to find the law that renumbered that part of the US Code and find the new parts. Then you need to see if any changes have been applied since (there hasn't really) and then you need to match the changes to the referenced sections in the old version of the code to the equivalent text in the current version of the code, modulo any changes to references that changed as part of the renumbering but are otherwise the same.
I'm not saying lawyers aren't really really expensive, but you don't have to spend a long time digging into just a simple question like "what parts of the law are no longer enforceable after a supreme court decision" before you start to understand why they charge the prices they do.
I love this, and I feel every legal document (of which there are many, for example, a random one: insurance companies' policies) should have something like this (and no, Word is not good for it)
YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to appear and hope they share the torrent...
Yes, it should absolutely change (both should be freely available), since ignorance of the law is not a defense, and case law is law (here, in the US, since we're a common law country). But the flip side of that is that the law has to be knowable, if ignorance is not a defense, or you're just going "lol too bad for you for not knowing the secret law".
Also, because how the judicial branch decides case law needs to be reviewable by the People, so that we can inform the various legislatures to adjust the law if the judicial system is not ruling to the will of the People.
Even without AI it should be. Honestly the less AI has to do with giving people access to our laws and court records the better since the value of having that access would decline with hallucinated laws/interpretations/attribution. A post about how AI isn't even fit to write wikipedia articles just fell off the front page a few hours ago, and providing something like this to the public seems at least as important.
Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.
> Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies,
In the interpretation of the law, yes, but that doesn't matter for version controlling the text of the law, and in that sense, you can absolutely manage the text pretty cleanly in git. Most laws are just text. Many bills are literal git-diffs, except in prose, which can make it hard to understand a bill.
> exception handling (hardcode-style responses)
This is basically non-sequitur (there no such thing as a "hardcode-style response" in git…), and again, I think you're misunderstanding the idea here.
> natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies
The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.
The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.
If you've got a statute like "no vehicles in the park," the fundamental issue is that you have to interpret "what is meant by 'vehicle'?" and no legal drafting is going to be good enough to actually cover all the possible cases well enough. The main difference between a common law and a civil law system here is that in a common law system, you have to cite the previous similar cases (because precedent is binding) whereas in a civil law system, you're merely using those previous similar cases as persuasive evidence. At the end of the day, it boils down to arguing for your interpretation.
And in my experience working on language standardization (which is closer to a civil law system than a common law system), it's fairly often that I have to resort to looking up not just when a change in the text occurred, but dive deep into the discussions of the paper proposing the change to understand what the committee thought it was doing with the change. The complexity of law is fairly similar--the changes to the law themselves often require understanding the legislative and interpretative history of the law to understand what the intent of the drafter was to be able to rule on how the law is extended to an unanticipated scenario.
Yeah but none of this matters for the "git for legislation" idea right? The point here is to record the history of the text of the laws, not their meaning.
It depends on the question you're trying to answer. The text of the US law which Citizen's United struck down remains on the books today (though has changed since it was moved to a different part of the code, so references have been updated), but the actual effective law has most certainly changed from when it was written to now. Since courts can't write or modify the law, the literal text remains, even if some of that text is effectively stricken as if the text had been removed.
If you want to know the literal text (that may or may not be enforceable), then sure a plain text diff is sufficient to know that nothing at all has changed about federal communication laws since this section was last amended in 2002. But if you want to know what the actual law is, you definitely need more than just a text diff.
See my response to the parent, but git blame solves the issue of "what did they mean" because the person (if alive) can just be asked. The same way git blame is used all the time to ask why a programmer did something some certain way, there's more to code too than just how exactly does it compile/execute. The higher level idea should be to stop legislation seemingly written by nobody, that nobody wants to answer for, but is used to make important decision about lives and livelihoods. Having courts needed to interpret verbiage that was written by living people is completely preposterous. If it's written by dead people, sure, that's a harder problem.
I see. The laws are completely different from my country, so this is very educational. My country uses civil law, but I see that is how it is under common law. Thank you very much.
This brings us to my even more unlikely idea - when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated. This way someone would always be there to just answer for the intent. Also would help garbage collect legislation that is no longer useful.
> when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated.
That seems like a great way to turn functional legislation into swiss cheese as one line at a time things are either kept or removed based on chance/circumstance and the whims of the current people in power.
Laws are collectively voted for as a complete package, and a law that worked and was passed as being acceptable can become useless, dangerous, and undesirable with a very small number of lines removed from them. I want lawmakers to spend their time focused on the entirety of a bill. Your idea would result in them fighting over who should or shouldn't be recorded as the official author of each and every line. We don't need nonsense like "Senator X will retire soon so Senator Y should author it!", or "I'll agree to author line 405 if you agree to author line 30!"
Your idea, like so many ideas where laws just fade away unless something happens to keep them, also sounds like a great way for you to lose longstanding freedoms and protections that should never be at risk of simply deprecating just because some one gets voted out or dies or retires.
The intent of a law should be clear from the text. It isn't always, but at least now it's possible. To have the intent of a law, or even worse the intent of specific lines within a law, subject to change at any time would make interrupting that law and establishing precedent a nightmare for the courts.
We really should have a system in place to help clear out old and unnecessary laws on the books, but this would be a terrible way to accomplish that.
The tl;dr is that doing git-style change-tracking of the legislation isn't as helpful in practice as you'd think (especially because a lot of the very basic change-tracking is already available in the existing tools that lawyers use!).
I put a lot of thought into this last decade, I find that some bills are big blocks of new text, and other bills are convoluted instructions to modify other blocks of existing law, sometimes saying "strike this word and that word" other times referencing just a subsection of another law. hyperlinks to that other law or a model of what the legal code would look like is necessary
Agentically this could be done now, but it would still just be the tip of the iceberg
You're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and that's just for one jurisdiction
Without 64-bit time though, can't use it historically. Since current legislation is always changes built upon legislation from long before unix epoch, it kind of falls flat.
There's actually two kinds of changes here: changes to the law, and changes to your description of the-law-and-its-changes (metachanges). For example, if you make a mistake in recording a change to the law, you need to fix that (unlike eg a source repo where mistakes in a commit message are forever).
So to make this a git repo, I guess you'd make the snapshots be the law plus markup for all the changes, and the diffs are the metachanges. For each snapshot S, you could generate a git repo whose snapshots are the law and the whose diffs are the changes in the law (as described by S). However, this probably isn't the best way to query S.
Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation. So who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest
That’s like saying that the code in a repo belongs to the whole team once a PR is merged, so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors.
> so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors
The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.
At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)
Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be responsible for.
If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.
"TeraText for Legislation"[1] has done this, specifically point in time reconstruction per amendments, for a couple of decades.
It uses a very 90s set of technologies, esp. XML, and is the golden source for legislation is a number of places around the world.
It is/was a very consulant-driven product and tightly coupled to a "secret sauce" database backend that no one really wants to use, but still, kind of cool.
[1] https://www.leidos.com/products/teratext
NYT, 2007:
"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."
(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )
I've always wanted this. It's such an obvious idea when you're a software engineer.
The system would be gamed by the politicians.
Insert language you know will never get enough votes
Don’t strike out but add language to make it useless
Plus the bill sponsor often makes changes others ask for, so the true author isn’t noted
It would be a mess and ignored by the public after a while
That would be in the pull request ... the main branch should only be actual passed legislation.
But there would be a papertrail that can be revisited. And journalists can access to keep people informed of systemic or major issues.
Every system gets gamed, and so is the current one. The goal is that the people can more easily stay informed. Even with mixed authors problem you highlight would be still an improvement.
Git does allow multiple contributors on each commit. Of course people can lie, but it's a matter of policy in the end. Make it a crime to not add all contributors to a diff.
Same. What I would like to see is Git for non-technical users, built as a public platform that is open source, hosting this.
I do think there are some Markdown-based open source projects that might fit the bill.
Wouldn't a wiki basically be exactly that?
There are a million frontends designed to simplify Git for non-programmers. In fact, lots of office software now has version management built-in. Very few people use it. This isn’t a technology problem.
We don’t need version control for legislative bills. We need journalists that track down who tried to insert what, summarize it, and present it to the public with context. That would satisfy the oversight purpose without getting lost in technicalities.
Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.
Why not both. I'm sure that more visibility would result in more requests for press inquiries.
Exactly, it’d make the press’ work easier, and maybe enable more people or entities to look into this topic over all, too.
We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else doing the type of research you just described this makes it faster and easier.
In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.
For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.
I am confused. Someone put in place a system that would allow journalists or citizens to meaningfully engage with the law in a much better way than they can now.
However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.
If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?
Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?
>Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job ...
Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do something when their paycheck depends on their not doing it.
Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and benefits.
> Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job
The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press for doing this job.
Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting does not.
A revision control system is a tool the journalists could use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could have commit messges documenting the context (when, how, why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the same amount of meta data.
Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.
> it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors
You’d just got a system of favors for who inserts what language. You’d hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for own comms.
When a measure becomes a target yada yada.
(Note: this proposal is for the U.S. code. Not bills. Git for the USC works.)
99% of the legislation changes are made by 20 something interns, on behalf of someone.
Indeed, both the name of the intern and the attribution on behalf-of should be required in the signed commit.
Such a requirement would not do what you think it would. There would not be names legislator or even aids as commit authors. The commit authors would be members of the House Office of the Legislative Counsel[1].
The House Office of the Legislative Counsel is non-partisan, impartial, and confidential. Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan. Is more partisanship in government not a concern?
The second issue with transparency is that communication between legislators and legislative counsel member is subject to the attorney-client relationship. Breaking attorney-client privilege is a serious decision. Knowing how such a change would affect the organization and its members is not something to be taken lightly.
A more convincing argument for transparency would address impartiality and confidentiality. This is pretty clearly a Chesterton's fence type situation where advocating to change a system should anticipate criticisms. Addressing opposition preemptively is an implicit demonstration of knowing why the system exists which is table stakes for changing it.
1. https://legcounsel.house.gov/
The authors are lobbyists of big corporations nowadays.
I'm doing this as open source for all amendment-driven law for the world. Finnish/Estonian law basically solved now but US/UK are a lot more complex to do correctly for some reason.
Now major version coming within 1 month probably with many architectural changes. The thesis is that it's basically all doable as a compiler but there may be certain cases which are irreducibly ambiguous and need human/AI to adjudicate them. The rest must be deterministic.
https://github.com/eliask/lawvm
The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.
It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.
> it benefits almost everyone
I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.
>> The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code.
> I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.
The US government works for the people and, as such, changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable, discoverable, and therefore justifiable by or condemnable to those who are responsible for said changes without fear or favor.
That is as practical as it gets.
> changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable, discoverable
They are. The history of the USC is public. This is one way of visualizing it. It’s good. But I want to see the advantage of this presentation.
why not just do it?
Because I have want my government to use the right tool for the job.
I don't want to privatize this core civic function to some NGO.
It sounds lazy tbh. No one said privatize. It can be open source can't it?
Reminds me of a similar project for french law
French bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
"Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May 2014 (0 comments)
Poland has an official, somewhat manual version of this - the ISAP system.
Actual bills are written in the form of patches ("§1. In the law X paragraph 5, the words "such and such" are replaced with "this and that". §2. The law X paragraph 4 is striked. §3. After law X paragraph 8, a new paragraph 8a is added that says "etc. and so on".)
After a patch or a collection of patches are passed, they are combined together and a unified version of the law is published. These documents aren't technically the law, they just show a snapshot of what the law is at the specific moment.
ISAP system is an online collection of all bills that were passed, plus crosslinks between laws that change/supercede/otherwise interact with each other, plus current and archival unified versions, plus related administrative orders and other miscellanious documents. Makes looking up laws and changes to laws very easy.
It's the European law, inspired mostly by French, IIRC. Belgium has the same, for instance.
I mostly meant the web app. Forgot to link it. https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/home.xsp Unfortunately it's only in Polish.
Example page for the traffic code https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19970...
First PDF is the original, second PDF is the unified version, then there's links - 4 others changed, 4 explicitly obsoleted, 12 implicitly obsolete, 707 administrative orders, 12 Constitutional Tribunal rulings, 11 previous + current unified versions, 212 patches, 14 relevant EU directives.
And the officially maintained website (that only tracks the final law changes instead of the whole process): https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/
I hadn't thought of using git to track the changes in legislation. This is a cool idea.
In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation.
So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean.
"A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/
> How does your MP vote on the issues that matter to you?
previously covered on hn:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485809
https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/ is a good resource at a federal level, but I don't know of a state or local equivalent.
> In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation.
That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only targeting federal level, but could also include state level
The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over
> "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/hansard and (linked from that page) https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Chamber_docume... would likely be good places to start
When I read AI-generated text, my eyes just start glazing over… it really is hard to read.
The idea is cool though.
Same. I don't know if it's the word choices or just me recognizing it as AI and subconsciously feeling cheated.
As an aside, my city FB group(small town, basically the local forum and news) has been absolutely flooded with AI 'flyers', and I have the same reaction. I can't put my finger on the exact reason, maybe the busy-ness, but they're repelling to my eyes.
Luckily after about 6 months of this now they're starting to get heavy pushback.
My brain instantly turns off from reading it too, you're not the only one.
German Constitution "Grundgesetz" on Github with proper time stamps https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz
If you're like me and also eager for cool uses for git, I'll share a cool one I use -- try out git for your resume! Commits change as you progress in life, and make branches for individually tailored resumes.
Blew my mind when I realized I could do that.
I've been working on this problem for several months now: https://www.wordstodata.com/
A surprising amount of tracking and diffing in legal texts is actually very different to git. It's a trap to assume software version control fits the needs for legal work.
Given that chicken scratch in the margins gets into bills that are voted upon, it seems unlikely that this would be accepted by Congress. Love it though.
I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.
Don't worry about that. Even if we only saw voted-upon revisions in the Git history, it will still be a huge improvement.
Version control for the public parts will make both public and secretive law-drafting better.
Why should any bit of the lawmaking process be secret?
Transparency has a cost. There are several good reasons, but my favorite is intellectual freedom. Policy makers would be much less likely to explore bold reforms or risky bipartisan compromises if their draft quality notes and correspondences were publicly tied to their political reputation. It takes significant work to produce successful legislation, and much of that work can be productively and safely done without direct public oversight. This is the same reason an individual might value a private journal.
If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it. They will certainly have a reason. Tell them if you disagree, and vote when you can.
> Policy makers would be much less likely to explore bold reforms or risky bipartisan compromises if their draft quality notes and correspondences were publicly tied to their political reputation.
Only if those bold reforms weren't in the interests of the people they serve. Risky bipartisan compromises should still be transparent along with what was gained in exchange for them. If the people feel that the compromise wasn't worth it they should be empowered to vote accordingly come election time. It's the job of representatives to assure the people who elected them that they are doing a good job and if they can't do that they deserve to lose their position. Refusing to support bold reforms that the people they represent want, or refusing to compromise when it would be beneficial to voters would become just as costly to their career.
> It takes significant work to produce successful legislation, and much of that work can be productively and safely done without direct public oversight.
Often most of that work is done entirely for them by corporations and lobbying groups and "law makers" just vote how they are paid to vote without even reading the bill put before them. Just because something can be done in secrecy doesn't make that the ideal way to do it. We've have extremely poor results with the system as it stands right now, so a change to introduce more transparency and accountability seems like a very good idea.
> This is the same reason an individual might value a private journal.
A public servant representing the people by making edits to laws and performing the duties they were elected to carry out is nothing at all like someone keeping a private journal. Their work is not their personal affairs, it is the public's affairs. How that work is being done matters to the public. Legislators would still remain free to go home at the end of the day and write in their private diary all they like.
> If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it.
When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind closed doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold them accountable for it, which is exactly why it takes place in secrecy. Increasing the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable by increasing transparency can only improve outcomes for voters, and it would certainty be inconvenient for elected officials who want to put their own interests above the interests of the people who elected them.
Likewise, a younger, more idealistic me thought it'd be great to use a GitHub-esque platform for laws. Pull Requests to suggest laws, gated behind reviews/approvals, branches so each house could work on their own versions before finally reconciling and merging into the Code, literally.
DC did this years ago, too: https://github.com/DCCouncil/law-xml
Someone set it up for Philly and Baltimore too, but I can't seem to find it.
Cool idea but I can't find anywhere on the linked page to try it? It reads like a neat concept but it's not clear if this is a thing they've actually made or not (or am I just missing something super obvious?)
Wow! This is very cool. I had an idea for something very similar to this when I found out the US federal government offered API keys, maybe three or four years ago. I found that while Congress did list bill revisions as they were made the format and retrieval of these was not an easy task. The idea was that I wanted to look at any line of any bill and see who proposed it that particular line’s inclusion.
For the record, and feel free to steal it if you like it, I called it “G(overnm)it-blame”
Maybe at this point we should just git revert
I proposed Git and Markdown instead of XML for EU law making in the European Parliament, they went with their own custom web editor to manupilate XML. And failed.
I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post some of that context.
Something akin to this is a big part of the products that companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters charge your lawyers a whole lot of money for. Because for a lot of legal questions, you don't just need to know what the law says now, but what it said at the time of the incident in question. And every legislative body around the country (at least at the time I was working in this space a decade ago) publishes legislative changes in completely different and often times not easily parsable forms. Web scraping and PDF scraping was far more common than you'd think. Some state legislatures published changes in more reasonable forms, and some states contract their official legislative compilation to companies like LexisNexis or Thompson Reuters and work to publish an actual change stream with proper standardized references. There's a lot of manual work that goes into making stuff like this work, a lot of lawyers and other legal professionals manually reviewing that the right pieces were removed or added in the right places, matching up references to parts of the law that might have changed between the time the legislation was passed and the time the change was published and figuring out what order everything actually goes in. And the actual text of the law is only part of the equation. Legal decisions from courts can dramatically impact the reading of the law, or effect effectively strike laws from the books (even if the laws are technically still on the books, just not enforceable). So often the right way to represent a diff of two points in time depends on the question you're trying to answer.
I wanted to do something like this for a single section in Washington law, to show why a particular funding restriction had been added, but was no longer achieving the intended goal. Git alone wasn't enough of a UI, because the 'why' was only in the introductory text of the bill that changed the law, and not in the law itself - and then there was the move of that article to a different section, and a re-numbering of sections, and a change in definition in a different section that affected the scope of this one... fascinating stuff!
I thought legal document versioning software would cover some of these problems but it doesn't seem like a similar enough process.
Following renumbers has to be one of the worst parts of this. As an example, the text of the US code that was modified by the BCRA in 2002 has been renumbered / moved since Citizens United v FEC was decided. But the text itself is the same as it was since the BCRA passed, because courts don't remove the actual law text with their decisions. So if you want to know what parts of the current US code were ruled unconstitutional by the courts in that decision and are therefore unenforceable, you need to first find the text of the BCRA, because the ruling refers to the sections of that piece of legislation. Then you need to find the version of the US code that was on the books when the BCRA was passed to find the section references that the law talks about. Then you need to find the law that renumbered that part of the US Code and find the new parts. Then you need to see if any changes have been applied since (there hasn't really) and then you need to match the changes to the referenced sections in the old version of the code to the equivalent text in the current version of the code, modulo any changes to references that changed as part of the renumbering but are otherwise the same.
I'm not saying lawyers aren't really really expensive, but you don't have to spend a long time digging into just a simple question like "what parts of the law are no longer enforceable after a supreme court decision" before you start to understand why they charge the prices they do.
You are correct the library of congress and the gpo do this.
I love this, and I feel every legal document (of which there are many, for example, a random one: insurance companies' policies) should have something like this (and no, Word is not good for it)
Does it already exist?
Law is programs running on humans.
YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to appear and hope they share the torrent...
Legislation you can generally access for free. Case law you often cannot.
Electrical & building codes are also paywalled, IIRC.
Its outrageous.
Thing which are public law should be publicly accessible.
There's an online portal for NEC code book, but they made it awful, no search, no hyper links, the bare minimum.
I used codex in computer mode to collect the relevant pages to my project. (Electricity to shed).
Should that change? In my opinion, in the age of AI, both should be generally accessible for free.
Yes, it should absolutely change (both should be freely available), since ignorance of the law is not a defense, and case law is law (here, in the US, since we're a common law country). But the flip side of that is that the law has to be knowable, if ignorance is not a defense, or you're just going "lol too bad for you for not knowing the secret law".
Also, because how the judicial branch decides case law needs to be reviewable by the People, so that we can inform the various legislatures to adjust the law if the judicial system is not ruling to the will of the People.
Even without AI it should be. Honestly the less AI has to do with giving people access to our laws and court records the better since the value of having that access would decline with hallucinated laws/interpretations/attribution. A post about how AI isn't even fit to write wikipedia articles just fell off the front page a few hours ago, and providing something like this to the public seems at least as important.
Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.
> Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies,
In the interpretation of the law, yes, but that doesn't matter for version controlling the text of the law, and in that sense, you can absolutely manage the text pretty cleanly in git. Most laws are just text. Many bills are literal git-diffs, except in prose, which can make it hard to understand a bill.
> exception handling (hardcode-style responses)
This is basically non-sequitur (there no such thing as a "hardcode-style response" in git…), and again, I think you're misunderstanding the idea here.
> natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies
The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.
The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.
Nah, it's pretty damn common in any legal system.
If you've got a statute like "no vehicles in the park," the fundamental issue is that you have to interpret "what is meant by 'vehicle'?" and no legal drafting is going to be good enough to actually cover all the possible cases well enough. The main difference between a common law and a civil law system here is that in a common law system, you have to cite the previous similar cases (because precedent is binding) whereas in a civil law system, you're merely using those previous similar cases as persuasive evidence. At the end of the day, it boils down to arguing for your interpretation.
And in my experience working on language standardization (which is closer to a civil law system than a common law system), it's fairly often that I have to resort to looking up not just when a change in the text occurred, but dive deep into the discussions of the paper proposing the change to understand what the committee thought it was doing with the change. The complexity of law is fairly similar--the changes to the law themselves often require understanding the legislative and interpretative history of the law to understand what the intent of the drafter was to be able to rule on how the law is extended to an unanticipated scenario.
Yeah but none of this matters for the "git for legislation" idea right? The point here is to record the history of the text of the laws, not their meaning.
It depends on the question you're trying to answer. The text of the US law which Citizen's United struck down remains on the books today (though has changed since it was moved to a different part of the code, so references have been updated), but the actual effective law has most certainly changed from when it was written to now. Since courts can't write or modify the law, the literal text remains, even if some of that text is effectively stricken as if the text had been removed.
If you want to know the literal text (that may or may not be enforceable), then sure a plain text diff is sufficient to know that nothing at all has changed about federal communication laws since this section was last amended in 2002. But if you want to know what the actual law is, you definitely need more than just a text diff.
See my response to the parent, but git blame solves the issue of "what did they mean" because the person (if alive) can just be asked. The same way git blame is used all the time to ask why a programmer did something some certain way, there's more to code too than just how exactly does it compile/execute. The higher level idea should be to stop legislation seemingly written by nobody, that nobody wants to answer for, but is used to make important decision about lives and livelihoods. Having courts needed to interpret verbiage that was written by living people is completely preposterous. If it's written by dead people, sure, that's a harder problem.
I see. The laws are completely different from my country, so this is very educational. My country uses civil law, but I see that is how it is under common law. Thank you very much.
This brings us to my even more unlikely idea - when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated. This way someone would always be there to just answer for the intent. Also would help garbage collect legislation that is no longer useful.
> when whoever wrote that line in the legislation dies or retires, the line enters a short review period where it's either renewed with a new author on the line to speak to it or is deprecated.
That seems like a great way to turn functional legislation into swiss cheese as one line at a time things are either kept or removed based on chance/circumstance and the whims of the current people in power.
Laws are collectively voted for as a complete package, and a law that worked and was passed as being acceptable can become useless, dangerous, and undesirable with a very small number of lines removed from them. I want lawmakers to spend their time focused on the entirety of a bill. Your idea would result in them fighting over who should or shouldn't be recorded as the official author of each and every line. We don't need nonsense like "Senator X will retire soon so Senator Y should author it!", or "I'll agree to author line 405 if you agree to author line 30!"
Your idea, like so many ideas where laws just fade away unless something happens to keep them, also sounds like a great way for you to lose longstanding freedoms and protections that should never be at risk of simply deprecating just because some one gets voted out or dies or retires.
The intent of a law should be clear from the text. It isn't always, but at least now it's possible. To have the intent of a law, or even worse the intent of specific lines within a law, subject to change at any time would make interrupting that law and establishing precedent a nightmare for the courts.
We really should have a system in place to help clear out old and unnecessary laws on the books, but this would be a terrible way to accomplish that.
I wonder if there are any public sources for any of this data at a federal level? And do any of them still hold the older now versions?
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625366 - United States Code (federal laws) in Git (2026-04-03, 15 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591 - Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub (2026-04-02, 32 comments)
I think it's parsing this data:
https://uscode.house.gov/download.html
Which was discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135504 - The entire US Code is now online in XML (2013-07-31, 237 comments)
Wasn’t this one of the original pitches for blockchain?
Not that I've ever heard.
Why would one need a trustless distributed system to store document deltas published by an inherently trusted entity (federal government)?
I think it's useful to link to a lawyer's take on the utility of a similar tool that was built by somebody else here: https://bsky.app/profile/questauthority.bsky.social/post/3mj...
The tl;dr is that doing git-style change-tracking of the legislation isn't as helpful in practice as you'd think (especially because a lot of the very basic change-tracking is already available in the existing tools that lawyers use!).
AI explainer videos are actually pretty good. Good usage.
Being able to git blame politicians and such would be very useful indeed (at first..) :-)
Why only at first?
Major party foul for not calling this "legitslate"
It’s a nice idea, but isn’t it a bit pointless if the law is not being applied?
I put a lot of thought into this last decade, I find that some bills are big blocks of new text, and other bills are convoluted instructions to modify other blocks of existing law, sometimes saying "strike this word and that word" other times referencing just a subsection of another law. hyperlinks to that other law or a model of what the legal code would look like is necessary
Agentically this could be done now, but it would still just be the tip of the iceberg
You're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and that's just for one jurisdiction
Brilliant! Now do it for company's T&Cs please!
Without 64-bit time though, can't use it historically. Since current legislation is always changes built upon legislation from long before unix epoch, it kind of falls flat.
> Deepseek, refactor this repo to simplify the code. Make no mistakes.
... And the tax code written in Python
Fraudulent title, you can't git-clone this.
There's actually two kinds of changes here: changes to the law, and changes to your description of the-law-and-its-changes (metachanges). For example, if you make a mistake in recording a change to the law, you need to fix that (unlike eg a source repo where mistakes in a commit message are forever).
So to make this a git repo, I guess you'd make the snapshots be the law plus markup for all the changes, and the diffs are the metachanges. For each snapshot S, you could generate a git repo whose snapshots are the law and the whose diffs are the changes in the law (as described by S). However, this probably isn't the best way to query S.
Not really. It is arguing for version controlled legislation. So who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy. I hope your "not clone-able" is in jest
> who’s responsible for what portions of literal laws and policy
This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill is a law, it's the will of the Congress.
That’s like saying that the code in a repo belongs to the whole team once a PR is merged, so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors.
> so it doesn’t make sense to track its provenance back to its original authors
The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.
At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)
You could tag yes/no/abstains to it.
Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be responsible for.
If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.