[Open-Legislation] Intro / Historic Statutes

Tue Feb 18 17:25:53 UTC 2014

Thank you John!

Personally I believe we can learn a lot from history also for today's legal
informatics projects. So this might be a good inspiration!

Best, Clemens

2014-02-18 17:34 GMT+01:00 John Levin <john at anterotesis.com>:

> Hi,
>
> A belated introduction, because I wanted to have something to show as well.
>
> I'm John Levin, a PhD student at Southampton, studying debtors in the long
> c18th century. Part of this involves reading a lot of old legislation, most
> of it repealed, covering debt, prisons, courts etc.
>
> Finding this legislation has not been simple. The main accessible sources
> are the old volumes in Google Books and the Internet Archive. There are the
> usual problems of poor scans, missing books and misleading metadata there,
> and also the problem that the different collections of statutes have
> different standards and criteria.
>
> The official source for laws in the UK, legislation.gov.uk, concentrates
> on the laws in force, and has very little coverage of repealed material.
>
> Consequently, I have compiled a great long list of links to the
> collections of statutes on Google & IA, and published it here:
> http://alsatia.org.uk/site/2014/02/resource-acts-of-parliament/
>
> At minimum it is a useful finding aid. But I'm a historian, so of course I
> believe that access to repealed legislation, in canonical form and open
> format, is just as necessary as any other set of government data. I outline
> some arguments in the above post.
>
> I know that Open Legislation is more concerned with contemporary
> legislation, but I hope there will be some crossover, technical and
> political, with historic issues.
>
> John
>
> --
> John Levin
> http://www.anterotesis.com
> http://twitter.com/anterotesis
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-legislation mailing list
> open-legislation at lists.okfn.org
> https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-legislation
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-legislation
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-legislation/attachments/20140218/8386b6ae/attachment-0002.html>