Global Law versions legislation with Git
SnooPeripherals5313 created Global Law, a GitHub repository that organizes legislation as semantic, versioned, attributable data that agents can query. The creator licensed the legal information under CC0 and said the project uses Git history to show changes over time. They said separate Claude Code sessions, one for each country or group of countries, downloaded available versions of laws from official publishers and wrote them as commits based on their in-force dates. When sources publish only amending acts, the scripts reconstruct earlier versions by applying amendments in sequence. The creator also said Claude Code running on Claude Opus 5.5 wrote nearly all of the code, while they set the goals, selected sources and made design decisions.
Global Law offers agents a structured, traceable and versioned way to access legal information while preserving a record of changes through Git. The reported workflow also shows how separate Claude Code sessions can perform large, source-specific data acquisition and transformation tasks.
| This hit #1 on HN yesterday (you can read lots of discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268380). Why would I want to do this? The idea is make all law semantic, versioned, easily attributable and query able by agents. I also believe this information should be freely available so CC0 license (do whatever you want with it). If interested, repo linked below, I'd welcome all comments and advice. Thanks! https://github.com/lexifina/global-law I built this project with Claude Code. It's completely free to use/try. The approach is pretty simple: use claude to make legislation attributable (git blame, versioning with timelines). Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) wrote nearly all the code. I set the goals, chose the sources and made the design decisions. Specifically: I ran separate Claude Code sessions, one per country or group of countries. Each one read the official publisher's site or API, checked robots.txt and the terms of use, and wrote a script that downloads every version of each law. The script then writes them out as a git history, one commit per change on its in-force date. When a source only publishes amending Acts, the script rebuilds past versions by applying each amendment in turn. The sessions shared findings with each other, such as dates before 1970, daylight-saving edge cases and other changes. I also worked on how the countries combine into one tree, with each country as a git submodule and all their histories interleaved by in-force date. Claude wrote the build script to ensure two independent builds come out hash-for-hash identical (usually i'd consider this overkill, but you want a good VCS for this). submitted by /u/SnooPeripherals5313 [link] [comments] |