this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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That would be a great project indeed... just a heads up:
I was part of a group exploring to do something similar a couple decades ago. The main problem we found, was dealing with those first two points: by the time we figured out all the places a single "state" (this wasn't in the US) stored all their legislation, they had already changed some of them. We realized that it would take either: collaboration from the government in terms of standardizing how they store things... or a constant game of chasing around the changes they made. At the time, we concluded it wasn't practical to do it for free, and indeed some paid services have emerged offering something similar, but they're not open.
My suggestion: if you managed to find a way for governments to make legislation accessible in a standardized way, that would be a HUGE success. Ideally, have it written into constitution, and/or use the constitution to beat government bodies into compliance.
Also a warning: the messy state of things, seems to be a sort of "job security" for some lawyer firms and companies offering the consolidation services, so taking that away may not be easy.