Git for the US Code

octoberfranklin

Fraudulent title, you can't git-clone this.

mushufasa

I'm not an expert in this domain but I'm aware there has been prior work to attempt this. I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post some of that context.

7kago_yomi

Unlike code, natural language laws have many exceptions and context dependencies, so trying to manage them cleanly with Git seems like it would be tough as data structuring costs and exception handling (hardcode-style responses) increase.

TomAbel

Reminds me of a similar project for french law French bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/ "Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May 2014 (0 comments)

xlayn

YES PLEASE, but I suspect it will degenerate into another paid service with 1000 tiers... I think you cannot access the US law without paying for it? odd... I will wait for claude law to appear and hope they share the torrent...

burnJS

I had this idea over 10 years ago but never finished it. I hope this takes off. I do fear it's not very practical for many big pieces of legislation which are often written in secret.

iAMkenough

Sounds neat, but not something a private company should be responsible for. If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.

counters

Major party foul for not calling this "legitslate"

barrrrald

Cool idea but I can't find anywhere on the linked page to try it? It reads like a neat concept but it's not clear if this is a thing they've actually made or not (or am I just missing something super obvious?)

pcblues

I hadn't thought of using git to track the changes in legislation. This is a cool idea. In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation. So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean. "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.

Ericson2314

The Hacker News Community (hah) needs to lobby hard to pass a law (what boostrapping!) to require the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... to maintain the repo as part of their duties, and do it retroactively for the entire history of the US Code. It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.

LPisGood

Wow! This is very cool. I had an idea for something very similar to this when I found out the US federal government offered API keys, maybe three or four years ago. I found that while Congress did list bill revisions as they were made the format and retrieval of these was not an easy task. The idea was that I wanted to look at any line of any bill and see who proposed it that particular line’s inclusion. For the record, and feel free to steal it if you like it, I called it “G(overnm)it-blame”

jcranmer

I think it's useful to link to a lawyer's take on the utility of a similar tool that was built by somebody else here: https://bsky.app/profile/questauthority.bsky.social/post/3mj... The tl;dr is that doing git-style change-tracking of the legislation isn't as helpful in practice as you'd think (especially because a lot of the very basic change-tracking is already available in the existing tools that lawyers use!).

layla5alive

Being able to git blame politicians and such would be very useful indeed (at first..) :-)

adamdennis

Wasn’t this one of the original pitches for blockchain?

yieldcrv

I put a lot of thought into this last decade, I find that some bills are big blocks of new text, and other bills are convoluted instructions to modify other blocks of existing law, sometimes saying "strike this word and that word" other times referencing just a subsection of another law. hyperlinks to that other law or a model of what the legal code would look like is necessary Agentically this could be done now, but it would still just be the tip of the iceberg You're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and that's just for one jurisdiction

aizk

If you're like me and also eager for cool uses for git, I'll share a cool one I use -- try out git for your resume! Commits change as you progress in life, and make branches for individually tailored resumes. Blew my mind when I realized I could do that.

NoMoreNicksLeft

Without 64-bit time though, can't use it historically. Since current legislation is always changes built upon legislation from long before unix epoch, it kind of falls flat.

nico

I love this, and I feel every legal document (of which there are many, for example, a random one: insurance companies' policies) should have something like this (and no, Word is not good for it) Does it already exist?

omoikane

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625366 - United States Code (federal laws) in Git (2026-04-03, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591 - Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub (2026-04-02, 32 comments) I think it's parsing this data: https://uscode.house.gov/download.html Which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135504 - The entire US Code is now online in XML (2013-07-31, 237 comments)