Idea: Bulk definition import from the law

[adelevie]

Quite possibly already though of, but:

You could probably target definitions sections from statutes and regulations and add them in bulk to this repo.

[konklone]

Definitely, as a starting point. I'm pretty big on readability and accessibility though, not legal precision. So I imagine they'd need a lot of rewriting.

[adelevie]

Do you envision this repo containing multiple definitions/sources for a term?

From a legal research perspective (which I know is not priority #1 here) being able to find all/ many of the legally-significance definitions for the same term would be a big win.

On Oct 10, 2013, at 1:16 PM, Eric Mill [email protected] wrote:

Definitely, as a starting point. I'm pretty big on readability and accessibility though, not legal precision. So I imagine they'd need a lot of rewriting.

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[waldoj]

@konklone and I talked last week about using the defined terms within installations of The State Decoded. The problem is that, as he says, they're awfully thick with legalese, and often recurse into other definitions. But what we thought would be a good idea was to a) combine the defined terms from a few installations and figure that any term that exists in X legal codes is a term that we should provide a generic definition for and b) extract common words and phrases from those multiply defined terms to automatically assemble a proposed list of synonyms.

To answer your question, the plan that Eric put forward was to provide multiple definitions, simply one after the other, as is done in a standard English dictionary. We discussed other approaches, but agreed that they added unnecessary complexity at this point.