I Put My Country's Entire Legal Code in Git: 300,000+ Documents Since 1810
Building a Git repo from the Chilean law: more than 300,000 legal documents in a corpus that reaches back to 1810. Lots of interesting engineering challenges.
In a groundbreaking initiative, Chilean programmer Pisanvs has compiled the nation's entire legal code into a Git repository, amassing over 300,000 documents dating back to 1810. This comprehensive collection, stored in the pisanvs/ley-chile repository and accessible at leyes.pisanvs.cl, showcases the power of version control in legal documentation.
The rationale behind this ambitious project stems from the limitations of traditional version control systems, such as MS Word, in effectively managing legal texts. Git, a widely adopted tool in the software industry, offers numerous advantages for legal code repositories, including chronological history, author attribution, branching, multi-file tracking, and selective historical undo, among others.
Building upon the Chilean legal data sources, primarily the Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional (BCN) and LeyChile, Pisanvs developed a pipeline that integrates with GitHub Actions, allowing for a self-contained and replicable ecosystem. This approach ensures that the repository remains easily clone-able, iterable, and accessible to anyone with a Git client.
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