Git for US Legislation

In the world of legal research, lawyers and programmers alike often struggle with understanding the lineage of laws. While programmers have a clear system to track the authorship and versioning of code, lawyers have been left without a comparable tool for statutes. However, a new approach aims to bring this level of clarity to the legal field.

Just as a programmer can see who wrote a line of code and when, a lawyer should be able to trace the origin and evolution of a statute. This is crucial, given that much legal research now relies on language models, which often struggle to keep up with the proper lineage of laws. Without this information, language models are limited in their ability to provide accurate interpretations.

The Office of the Law Revision Counsel maintains a record of every change made to enacted laws, but this information is often presented in prose rather than a structured system. Changes to statutes can take effect on different dates, depending on the specific circumstances, and the default rule is that a law takes effect on the day it is enacted. For example, the definition of a small business debtor in 11 USC § 1182(1) shows how the answers to legal questions can vary over time.

To better understand the history of laws, a study from the Technical University of Munich found that language models often fail to apply the correct rules and preferences, leading to inaccuracies in their responses. This highlights the importance of having a reliable and checkable history of law changes. By creating a system that records the text, the date each change took effect, and the scope of any law that reaches back, lawyers can easily access the information they need to make informed decisions.

The system would work by comparing release points from 2017 onward, carrying out the amending instructions in date order, and comparing the result with the newer version. This would allow for a thorough examination of each change, which is then recorded along with the law and the date it took effect. Of the 365 changes analyzed, 361 reproduced the next release point exactly, while the remaining four required further investigation.

With this comprehensive record, lawyers can easily answer questions about the legal landscape at any given time. By selecting a date, they can view the text in force on that date, with any wording that has changed marked in a distinctive color. Each phrase can be colored by the Act that wrote it, and a change to a defined term will list every other provision that uses it. This allows for a detailed exploration of how the law has evolved over time.

While the current version of the system does not yet account for a later law's reach back on earlier dates, this is an area that is being actively explored. Each change in the system is linked to the law's own words, and for anything of significance, the original should still be consulted. The system also aims to address the right form factor for presenting this information, ensuring that lawyers can easily access and understand the history of laws in a format that suits their needs.