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jandinter | 4 years ago

Looks neat!

I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, especially in very regulated areas, make use of “functions” “imported” from other, totally different laws.

Sorry for being off-topic, but if anyone knows a resource for that, I am super interested!

discuss

order

earth_walker|4 years ago

I started doing this for a niche area: US and European regulations and guidance documents for Good Laboratory Practice, and later for Canadian Cannabis regulations. Basically I created a standard XML schema for regulations and parsed them into XML [1]. This allowed for e.g. presenting tables of contents and section folding, pulling and linking definitions into their own search engine, etc. [2]

I thought that I could easily write a parser for each jurisdiction's formats, and then get predicate rules and related regulations for free.

I was wrong. a) there are many jurisdictions and sub-groups all doing their own thing; and b) most don't have any standard document formatting or tagging, let alone a defined structure. Even in the most structured formats (like the US eCFR's XML) the focus is on display rather than content. In the worst cases it was just whoever wrote up the Word document chose how they numbered and formatted chapters and sections etc.

There were so many special cases that it was a huge amount of work to add or update each document, and I ended up doing a lot of categorization and fixing by hand.

[1] I know people hate XML on HN, but I did my research and had specific reasons for choosing it at the time, including human readable, nesting sections, being able to easily publish and validate a schema, etc.

[2] See ReadtheRegs.com. You can browse the definitions page without an account.

jandinter|4 years ago

This looks great! I share your sentiment: I looked into the XML files for the published German legal texts[1], and they seem to be made for display purposes only.

[1] Table of contents for XML files: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml

masklinn|4 years ago

> I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, especially in very regulated areas, make use of “functions” “imported” from other, totally different laws.

I mean, it "is", to the extent that if you put in the work of hyperlinking all the things during the digitizing process they can be.

Légifrance is fairly highly (though nowhere near completely) hyperlinked for instance, here's one of the laws I selected from the front page: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000044446848

Many (though nowhere near all) the legal texts being referenced, modified, or inserted (as references, into other texts) are hyperlinked.

ova-throwaway|4 years ago

? baby lawyer and former dev here: don't we have that anyways? E.g. on Casetext, Lexis, all the usual legal research sites.

I personally haven't encountered a situation where it was totally lacking.

jandinter|4 years ago

Many available options seem to be based on manual annotation and, therefore, cover a limited range of all legal texts. Especially with regard to regulatory topics, those research sites usually fall short.