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Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by culi on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @10:04PM (#34157046)
I did a little side project where I tracked the partisan lean of each state over the years. I wanted to do a thing where I plot markers for every year where there was a major law passed that affected voting access in some way

I was SHOCKED how difficult it is to access public law in the majority of states. And even more shocked about how little academic research and resources there are about this particular study. I found it difficult to find studies that compared laws in multiple states in general. I assume the reason for this is mostly to do with lack of quality databases and resources for this.

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by nicbou on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @02:38AM (#34158539)
Germany has gesetze-im-internet.de. All federal laws are there, in plain, linkable HTML. I link to this website all the time. They even have English translations of some parts.

The city of Berlin has their own version, although I find it unusable. It's slow, and hard to reliably link to.

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by fweimer on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @03:36AM (#34158878)
gesetze-im-internet.de is operated by juris GmbH. They used to claim exclusive rights for their custom-made consolidated versions, and I believe they still claim something like that for historic versions available through their commercial subscription. (It so happens that juris also runs gesetze.berlin.de.) These juris versions are often viewed as authoritative, despite being made by a private company outside of the legislative process. There's another completely non-official website called buzer.de, which handles this so much better.

If you want to read the actual law as published, that's another commercial service (Bundesgesetzblatt, run by Bundesanzeiger Verlag), and there, the company claims protection rights as a database work. You are expected to buy a subscription if you want to print or search the PDF files they offer for viewing, or apparently for any kind of non-personal use. Unlike gesetze-im-internet.de and despite its commercial nature, Bundesgesetzblatt is an official federal publication.

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by Vespasian on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @08:52AM (#34160926)
Gesetzte im Internet is published by the ministry of Justice

According to https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/impressum.html is "just" providing the technical infrastructure(?).

There is also dejure which is 100%.

Am I missing something.

The commercial Bundesgesetzblatt is a scandal indeed

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by fweimer on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @10:32AM (#34161957)
I don't think the BMJ or other parts of the feral government have in-sourced the editorial process. Historically, juris claimed copyright-like protection for the consolidated text, as can be seen here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060826035858/http://www.gesetz...

I think producing consolidated text is viewed by large parts of the legal community as “just typing”, similar to early attitudes towards programming, which is why few people care. Most of the controversy around juris is about access to court decisions.

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by tiahura on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @09:20AM (#34161188)
What state doesn’t have their statutes online?
Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by esbranson on Thursday December 29, 2022 @08:55AM (#34172597)
All states have their laws, regulations, and jurisprudence online like North Korea has freedom of speech. Technically yes, but effectively no.
Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by tiahura on Thursday December 29, 2022 @09:27AM (#34172864)
What other topics are you horribly misinformed about?

http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/alison/codeofalabama...

https://www.akleg.gov/basis/statutes.asp

https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ArkansasLaw

I think every municipality has them online as well.

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by esbranson on Thursday December 29, 2022 @12:54PM (#34175562)
How many words do any of those have? A simple word count. Like any word processor can provide circa 1980.
Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by tiahura on Thursday December 29, 2022 @01:15PM (#34175844)
A bunch? How is word count relevant?
Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by esbranson on Thursday January 05, 2023 @06:33PM (#34268563)
It’s a simple function that operates on the entire set of data, not just a sample.

You cannot do even a simple function on the entire set of data. Your examples are piecemeal samples, not the law.

You can’t do a simple word count of the law because you do not have access to the law.

Re:Added 49 volumes of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee law by culi on Friday December 30, 2022 @07:50PM (#34192006)
Oh they have them online. Some in terrible pdfs or on sites that are randomly down with no warning. Rarely do you get good text search. God bless you if you're expecting some sort of API

The biggest surprise to me however was the lack of any well-organized effort to centralize all of these. To have them all in one API and make it easy to compare across states or get basic data around what gets passed when, who voted for what, etc. The latter information is sometimes not even available