[Open-Legislation] French civil code on git

Wed Apr 8 15:18:54 UTC 2015

2015-04-08 15:57 GMT+01:00 stef <s at ctrlc.hu>:
>
>
> the thing is the goal defines the tool, and i have yet not encountered a
> goal
> where git is the right tool (except for publicity stunts). for example

We may be talking at cross-purposes here. My interest (which the github
example was directed at) concerned amendments to the body of statute law
(in that case, to a code) over time, not to amendments to draft legislative
instruments during their passage through a legislature. The two are quite
different.

Amendments to the body of statute law are important because they allow you
to track what the specific state of the law was at a particular date in the
past. It is not uncommon for me to need to do that in practice and the
tools available to me for UK law are not yet good enough to allow me to do
this reliably.

I have had cases where timing was critical and so I have needed to track
these things. I once came to entirely the wrong conclusion because there
was no way for me to discover that a particular provision had been repealed:

- it was repealed twice, the first time with a saving provision, and the
second time without
- the second repeal occurred in a statutory instrument that used the wrong
name for the statute it was repealing, causing (I think) databases such as
Westlaw not to notice it
- there was no way to tell with the tools available that it had been
repealed a second time (the fact was noted nowhere except the instrument
that caused the repeal)

-- 
Francis Davey
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