Law and Software

I took a break recently from working through the ILRC Immigration Law practice guides, so I could flatline. The result is a new online edition of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The work was done in 17 days, with time off for good behavior during the holidays.

Flatlining is a computational technique I developed a couple of years back that lets you make hundreds of thousands of edits and corrections to a text corpus very quickly and with a micro-percentage error rate. Actually it borders on a nano-percentage, Humans (poor things) think that a 1% error rate is pretty good. They should try flatlining.

I flatlined the Immigration and Nationality Act. What’s that about? I’m glad you asked. The Immigration and Nationality Act is part of Title 8 of the US Code. To be precise, it is 165 sections of that code title. Close to 5000 paragraphs of text and about the same number of cross-references between parts of the Act. Fun. My hardcopy of the Act published by West is over 500 pages. And impossible to find my way around.

And yes there are a number of online versions, including one from USCIS itself. But the people who produce these things aren’t the people who use them. So all you get is a very vanilla e-copy of a text. Even the pay-to-play legal sharks don’t do much better – they are way more interested in quantity than quality. Basically, the online versions suck. The immigration resources at the LII at Cornell are the exception, although I wish they didn’t need to spam you for a donation.

I took the break because I was losing it. There were so many sections, and subsection (a) and clause (i) and on and on. And you have to go study the code to make any sense of it all. What’s with that? Law school is so over. What I need is a version of the code that is self explanatory. And I want more, but that’s for a later post. I want to be able to read the code like I read a Grisham novel. I want it to be easy. I am not a computer program. I am not a trained librarian. There aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to follow 5000 cross-references. The numbers just become a blur. But I am getting off point.

Congress makes electronic versions of the US Code and Regulations freely available. Text, PDF and HTML versions are generated from their database. I really wanted the database, but they don’t give you that. The HTML version is the only structured version available, so that’s where you start.

The challenge is to reverse engineer the HTML into XML. And then make sure the structure (of sections, paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, clauses, sub-clauses and more) consistent and correct. And then to take every instance of “as we said in Clause (i) of that section” and work out what they are talking about. Seventeen days of flatlining (while listening to the audiobook of Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole adventure “the Bat”, Nate Silver’s “Signal and the Noise” and all three volumes of the Hunger Games), over 100,000 changes to the text, some fun with XSL transformations and a little program I called “magic” which I’ll also post, and… the first public preliminary prototype pre-alpha of the Law and Software Online Edition of the Immigration and Nationality Act (2011) is up. Yay. Ipad compatible!

It is just a first public preliminary prototype pre-alpha. But it gets me over my mental block with the practice guide. It is (a) pretty, (b) 99.9999% cross-referenced – so most all references to other sections or other parts of the same section are now hypertext connected, and (c) you don’t really need to use these links after all. It is a statutory hovercraft. Hover the mouse over any of these links and you get a small popup of the start of the referenced clause/s. Enough for you to remember what it is referring to and keep reading. And on the ipad, where you dont have a mouse, and (shifting into HTML programming for a moment) there is no equivalent to a “mouseover” event,  I’ve created a new two-finger gesture – an upside down version of Winston Churchill’s famous V for Victory – where you tap the link with one other finger on the screen at the same time, and you get the popup hint. tap with one finger as usual and you go there.

So I’m now back to reading the ILRC Practice Guide on my ipad. I have the Guide PDF in PDF Expert (my favorite PDF reader) and the L&S Edition of the INA in Chrome. And thanks to the four finger multitasking gesture, I can swipe away the Guide with four fingers to reveal the INA so I can read the section they are talking about, and finally I can read and understand it too.

Development of the Online Edition is now paused while I work those Practice Guides. Until I hit another roadblock. Works on all known Macs. I need to test it on Windoze. Don’t try this at home, kids.