Website that holds all the information about existing laws

[chrisbeaman]

This idea was suggested by Nate Schultz:

Website that holds all the information about existing laws (with changes, proposed, current, et alis) and preferably with related case law links. (Even better if we can get expert commentary for the topics, but that's beyond the scope) Such a site could be really useful to those interested in what the actual rules that govern their case are. Basically, it would make personal legal investigations a lot easier, and could make being a lawyer cheaper, too.

Tech thoughts: There would be at least two IP parts to this: The database and interface to it would be one chunk. (common to pretty much every government who might want it) The other part would be the laws of the government in question, be it city, state, federal, or even foreign. Thus, making data entry easy to do for authorized personnel and hard to deface, is important. (If you use something like MongoDB, you might be able to leave the stores completely separate and use some common link format.)

Biz thoughts: We could theoretically produce a customized access scheme or something, (key is that it be desirable to have your own copy) and sell it to interested parties. There could be advantages to having an intranet version that's essentially identical, say, or maybe that coordinates to a document server with links to the relevant templates/boilerplate/std.forms/whatever. IANAL, so I really don't know off my noggin what's reasonable as a value-added feature, here, but you get the gist:

We could let municipalities pay us to install their local system with an agreement to get the result of ongoing published data. (Heck, the database itself AND the sourcecode could both be publicly available, and we could still get people to pay us for customized things that access the trove.) The system ought to be designed to integrate seamlessly with other governments' offerings, if available.

A similar notion for GIS information makes a whole lot of sense, too.

Here is a pre-existing solution that Nate and I discussed that is similar to what he's thinking here:
http://openstates.org/al/legislators/ALL000156/anthony-daniels/

[robert-hanson]

This sounds really interesting to me. I can see alot of potential uses for something like this. I'd love to learn more and/or help out.