United States Code (federal laws) in Git

nickvido 42 points 14 comments April 03, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

brodouevencode

hot take: this is how legislation should work open comments, accepting pull requests, use AI tooling to weed out the ragebait and trolling for things that might actually be useful

dataflow

Is there one for the Statutes at Large?

cvoss

> Not all titles are positive law — some titles are "evidence of law" rather than the legal text itself (see 1 USC § 204) The vocabulary of this sentence is inconsistent with section 204 [0]. It is the positively enacted titles which are "legal evidence of the laws". The other titles merely "establish prima facie" what the law is, subordinate to a closer examination of the bills actually passed, which control. In other words, "evidence of law" is the stronger of the two, not the weaker, as the readme suggests. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/204

mrweasel

A few years ago I was thinking about how one might do the same for Danish laws, but those are written by idiots (lawyers). Rather than revising a law, a new one seems to be written using text like: The word "is" replaces the word "was" in line 5 and 6 in "Law on X,Y,Z, paragraf 8, section 5". Or "section 9 in Law on Q,V,W is removed, in favour of the following text". Why the hell you not just rewrite the old law and bump the revision? After just two revision it's basically impossible to read the actual law. I think that's on purpose.

cap11235

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591

bnchrch

There's an interesting side effect to the current state of the non-technical world. We have some new tools that increase productivity, and these same tools both lower the barrier to entry to understanding software concepts and building software. I think the result is more people who would've been traditionally considered non-technical are going to be onboarding to concepts that wouldve been traditionally ring fenced in the developer world. Granular version control and diffs being one of them. If this trend is real, and relatively large, I think it will be a good thing.

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