Law is Code, and We're Here to Open Source It / Open Source Bridge: The conference for open source citizens

Law is Code, and We're Here to Open Source It

Accepted Session

Culture

Short Form

Scheduled: Thursday, June 23, 2011 from 10:00 – 10:45am in B201

Session notes

Anyone can show how to save the world. We tell how to receive unsolicited love letters while doing it.

“You are a true pillar of democracy.”

“I love you.”

Who wouldn’t want to get emails like these? We’ll show how it’s done. First half, presentation. Second half, questions and discussion.

Presentation Outline

A New Model: Open Sourcing our Laws
- Not an entirely new idea
  - Kohel Haver, first person to ‘open source’ the ORS.
- There is plenty out there, ready for the doing
- Examples
  - […]
- Legal Issues to Consider
  - Federal legal documents: public domain
  - State and local governmental legal documents: quasi public domain

This helps so many people in different groups
- Increasing access to the legal system, e.g. for
  - The person who got into a car accident
  - People who want to link to, discuss, and debate our laws
  - Law students, lawyers, and law librarians
- Students and non-wealthy lawyers are exploited by the old, existing research system.
  - “It’s awful; it’s terrible.”

Enabled by Open Source Tools
- HTML Parser — Nokogiri
- Web Crawling — wget, curl
- Specialized web browser — Lynx, specially hacked
- Text File Manipulation Tools — find, grep, awk
- Text editing — emacs, vi
- Web Server Stack — Linux, Apache, Ruby, Rails
- Communication — Wordpress

Unique Benefits to this Type of Project
- Many, e.g.:
  1. Immense good will
    - “People never get sick of hearing about your site’s updates. It
      must feel pretty freakin’ good that your site is so desirable.”
    - “It’s pretty cool that you can get away with stuff like that. People
      actually do want to know when there’s something new.”
  2. It can pay for itself.