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by raynr
1421 days ago
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The main difference between this, versus using a web search engine, appears to be the readability sorting of definitions and the fact that the definitions are scraped from government resources. The sorting is quite a bit of fun to see in action. But, what advantage is there that the source is from a government resource? Versus, say, doing a Google search, or browsing Merriam-Webster's legal dictionary, or doing a search through Black's online edition, and so on. |
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First, they're public-domain, or should be! In reality, there's crown copyright in the commonwealth countries. And every US State is its own fiefdom often with arcane publishing deals that keep the laws out of the public domain (or so they claim). In the US, only federally authored works are clearly public domain by statute. I got tangentially involved in the issue when I was in law school when I made my first app for Oregon: https://boingboing.net/2009/10/30/oregon-once-again-cl.html
Second, my thinking goes like this: For most people, interactions with their local government is a big part of the legal process. And so knowing how the government defines words is extremely important. IMO it's very persuasive to use the govt's own text in one's arguments. Some of the dictionary's definitions are from actual statutes, and so have the force of law. E.g. https://www.public.law/dictionary/sources/world.public.law__...
Black's is a fantastic book, and I'm a big fan of its editor, Bryan Garner. But as far legal arguments go, it's merely a somewhat persuasive "secondary source."
Ok, and finally, by me picking the sources, I'm filtering out tons of unattributed crap that's online.