[andyjohnson0]

This github repo seems to treat the French legal code as a flat text file. Which is useful, but I'm guessing doesn't do a good job of capturing structural changes to the legal code. Is this fair?

So I'm curious: how do legal scholars and practising lawyers track changes to legal systems over time? Do they use trees, DAGs, or something else? Do they have concepts similar to change dependencies and regressions? What special concepts or techniques does the domain require?

The UK has legislation.gov.uk [1], which seems to treat acts of the UK parliament as some kind of structured objects. Amendments can be accessed, and there is a timeline feature (for example [2]) that shows changes over time. It does have the feeling of being incomplete, though, and lagging behind changes as they happen. So is there some other, canonical, data source that this site tracks? What is it?

Anyone knowledgeable care to comment?

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/

[2] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/39/section/21?timel...

[terminalcommand]

I am at my first year of law school in Turkey, so I might be wrong. But in my country there are private companies who collect and summarize court decisions. They also offer search engines.

As far as the changes to regulations go, they are announced in the state paper, with a starting date. All lawyers are obligated to follow the changes. The ministery of justice also offers a service, they collect all the law texts and publish them. Although recent changes come with a considarable amount of delay. So you use it at your own risk.

In germany there is an excellent site: http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/413.html You can browse the regulations and read the comments and decisions based on that very regulation. I hope we had a similar site here in Turkey.

Moreover, I also have to state that law regulations don't change quite often. The regulations that change are usually very specialised. All regulations already have a structural order. Especially code books like civil code have regulations that can't be treated seperately.

Last but not least, UK and US have a different law system than France. French law has its roots in Roman law. Nearly all regulations are written in books like civil code.

[karambahh]

Pretty similar in France. Lamy, a subsidiary of Wolters Kluwer is the leading company. They do the same for a bunch of european countries. Spain, Belgium, Germany, etc...

[FrobeniusTwist]

IIA[American]L.

The answer to your question about how lawyers figure out changes to the law is: they give an assignment to a new associate (or law student, in the case of scholars) to track down the history manually. It's a horrible pain in the ass.

Most codifications I'm familiar with (both state and Federal), whether in print or online, include a list of amendments along with each statute. But any given amendment may have changed a dozen (or far more) statutes, and it's generally a tedious and time consuming job to track down the changes to a given statute over time. Also, the reasoning for the changes, when it's given at all, is often burried in committee reports, which are rarely accessible by following links on a webpage. Some commercial services (LEXIS, WestLaw) will provide historical "snapshots" of particularly important statutes (the Internal Revenue Code, for example), which can help to some degree but which still leave a lot to be desired.

Statutes in general contain a lot of structural information (cross-references, definitions, etc.) which in some online sources are hyperlinked at least, but changes to which are not to my knowledge expressly tracked. One can easily get confused when, for example, a court case refers to a section of a statute that has been renumbered, or to which a new subsection has been inserted in the middle.

I took a quick look at the UK site above, and ... it actually looks quite impressive. As you say, however, it doesn't purport to be current, so some legwork is still left to the grunts. As a former programmer (and text munger a la Perl), it has always seemed to me that there should be a lot of opportunities to apply the tools of software development (version control in particular) to the texts of the law, but simply slurping up text into a repository is not likely to be all that helpful, and the overhead of doing anything useful would be considerable.