zlacker

What do you do about bills which refer to existing laws, with instructions to "strike blah" and "insert foo before x in section xxx of this chapter"?

Maybe it's possible to parse that and apply that sort of bill most of the time, but I'd be surprised if it were possible to do so reliably (unless natural language processing becomes a solved problem) (or perhaps I'm overestimating the complexity of legislative language and converting legislation into a patch against existing law is not a hard problem).

The first step, however, could be to do revision control of bills, blind to references to existing law.

Representing bills as patches to current body of law is the endgame, but I think simple revision control of bills as they wind through the legislative process would add a lot of value and would be relatively straightforward.

>>harshr+(OP)
My understanding of the legislative process is that a bill exists in a stand-alone form while it is being debated. When it is voted upon in its final form, however, lawyers working for the legislative branch convert the "human readable" form of the bill into what is, in effect, a "patch" to the existing law (i.e., "Paragraph B of subsection 2 of title 18 shall be amended to read ..."). My (albeit cursory) understanding is that these literal changes to the code are what are actually voted into law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service

Conceivably, changes to the US code could be tracked in the same way that changes to a bill are tracked, and every bill could be introduced as a branch of the US Code (i.e. a patch on the trunk), and every vote on a bill would be a vote to merge that branch.

>>harshr+(OP)
Go the opposite direction. Make changes to existing law, run a diff, convert the diff into "strike blah, insert foo" format, and that's your bill.

>>Dennis+xM
The EU parliament has an amendments systems that does exactly that: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/european-parliament-share-a... .