[gtf21]

This would be a great idea in general for the legislature of any country, to be able to see exactly how and when the law was changed would be valuable for transparency and also research. Commit messages could reference transcripts of the debates surrounding changes.

[mauricemir]

The executive wouldn't like it :-)

As one of the candidates for the speaker of the House of commons said to me "the executive can get a way with a lot" in terms of controlling the order paper and timing

Stil think Parmjit would have made a better speaker than Bercow

[ptaipale]

TL;DR: Denmark, Finland, Sweden and presumably others do it already.

I'm surprised if France and other supposedly civilized countries don't do it on behalf of the Justice Ministry or equivalent. I mean, the fundamental responsibility of citizens is to adhere to the law (ignorantia juris non excusat); the fundamental responsibility of government is to make the law available to citizens because it is not reasonable to require compliance with laws that are not practically available to citizens.

I'm in Finland, and the full content of law books has been in internet for almost 20 years, published first by the state-owned publishing house that gave out the print versions, and more recently by Ministry of Justice who has contracted the technical execution out. The database structure managing pieces of legislation dates back to 1980's, but until 1990's it was available only through a license payment.

Individual laws (and executive orders, state treaties and such) that are published by parliament or ministries have of course always been public information and published in the net since 1990's; the important thing is actually maintenance of "up-to-date" version because the parliament publishes its laws mostly as "patches" (i.e. only a changed section is reviewed, voted on, and published).

The database cross-links to published parliamentary process so that the official background work for each law, section and paragraph is available, including preparatory statements by parliamentary committees, any dissenting opinions and so on.

Also more significant precedent cases from high courts are available in database. (We have a so-called Roman law system where the code is primary source of law, unlike American/English common law where precedents are more important; nevertheless neither system is absolute of course, and precedents do matter in civil law systems as well.)

The database descriptions can be found:

Denmark: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_dk/index_en.htm

Finland: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_fi/index_en.htm

France: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_de/index_en.htm

Germany: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_de/index_en.htm

Sweden: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_sv/index_en.htm

[mackwic]

> I'm surprised if France and other supposedly civilized countries don't do it on behalf of the Justice Ministry or equivalent.

Please be kind in your comments.

Also, you're wrong (http://legifrance.gouv.fr/), but that's secondary relatively to the harsh tone you had there.

[ptaipale]

Well, I said "surprised if", not "surprised that".

The eur-lex link I mentioned lists precisely that site (legifrance) for France. But as I don't read French and don't know the particulars, what puzzles me is what is the additional value of putting the same thing in Github. The maintenance burden seems horrific unless you can pull it automatically, and even then the actual benefit of using Github is not so clear to me.

[masklinn]

> The maintenance burden seems horrific unless you can pull it automatically

Which is probably relatively easy, legifrace provides reconciliated articles with history so it should be possible to just crawl the code, see if an article was updated since the last crawling and generate the relevant commits.

> and even then the actual benefit of using Github is not so clear to me.

Diffs are somewhat more straightforward than the equivalent legalese, and version-controlled markdown makes for easier programmatic manipulations across "space" and time than a custom-designed website.

[ptaipale]

Right, that makes sense then.