LinkedLegislation Blog

Pope Francis published a remarkable document today, called the "Gaudete et exsultate", an exhortation to holiness. He says its goal is to "repropose the call to holiness in a practical way for our own time". The philosophy of the document is bold and modern. Each of its 177 numbered paragraphs, in five... [Read More]

I was reminded this week that our best customers at Xcential are those who try to build a legislative data system themselves first. And today's XCKD perfectly sums up why:https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/here_to_help.png [Read More]

Laws change. Each time a new U.S. law is enacted, it enters a backdrop of approximately 22 million words of existing law. The new law may strike some text, add some text, and make other adjustments that trickle through the legal corpus. Seeing these changes in context would help lawmakers... [Read More]

People want everything. When they're searching, they want flexibility and they want precision, too. Legal researchers, especially, show this cognitive dissonance: in their personal lives they are used to Google's flexibility ("show me that hairy dog that looks like a mop"), and at work they use 'Advanced' search interfaces that... [Read More]

A government client wants to be able to search through their data. In a typical case, an office or agency has a long-standing rulebook that employees still carry around in a paper binder, because they lack a browsable, searchable electronic version. For example, the GSA's consulting group, 18F recently described... [Read More]