Legal data access metrics

[abitrolly]

Laws tend to turn into oppressive FUD (fear, uncertainty, despair) system that paralyzes both citizen lives (people can't validate what is legal and what is not ) and business (availability of money and opportunities, causes and consequences of punishments).

My personal wish list that I miss from my country.

1. Completeness
  1. How many laws are out there?
  2. How many laws are active/inactive?
  3. How many are going to appear/expire when?
  4. How many are applicable to me?

2. Access
  1. Do laws have logical IDs?
  2. How many laws are open access?
  3. Does every law has reference location (URL)?
  4. Are all reference locations free to access (no auth, fee, VPN, needed)?
  5. Are contents of the laws addressable (can I give a direct link to paragraph)?
  6. Are contents of the laws diffable (can I upload them to GitHub)?
  7. Can I copy and republish laws on my site for reference and quoting?

3. Reliability
  1. Can I track new laws that apply to me?
  2. Can I backup laws on my machine and local search it?
  3. Can I update my copy with new data?

Does it sound good? I didn't use AI, so it looks a bit clumsy. But does it make sense to automatically range countries based on this criteria?

[malteos]

Hi @abitrolly

it would be indeed very interesting to get the data for all those questions. Open Legal Data has currently only data for Germany though. What is the country you are interested in?

Best,
Malte

[abitrolly]

@malteos I am actually interested to see the map where people can compare countries. And where they can answer these questions to get the index of their country. I am originally based in Belarus.

There is no open access to law - you can download PDF from the reference source - https://pravo.by but the same governmental office provides commercial access to laws, so there is conflict of interest. I also can not reupload the PDFs to my own site for archival and referencing without saying "this site is not a source of law information". I can not give references to specific clauses. Can not track which laws are affecting me or my imaginary business. Not all laws are available online - some are only for members of some consortiums, like crypto/blockchain, so not only paid, but also privileged access. Not clear how many laws are out there at all - some local authorities can produce their own. If you ask lawyers to compile you a list of all law subjects - they won't be able to do this. There is no list of entities who produce laws that affect me. The law IDs are illogical and untraceable - there are few of them.

I wonder if my country is original, or they've just copied everything from somebody else. I know that in US people can reference definitions like MTB online, and it will be just this paragraph, not a 72 pages PDF.