When will we bid farewell to statute books?
I don’t mean getting rid of the law itself, but rather ending the actual publication of statutes and other legal information in book form. The book I’m currently reading for pleasure features an outstanding logical structure. Everything I need to understand the page I’m reading is detailed on the preceding pages. The fact that I’m reading it on my ereader doesn’t make a difference. Statute books, by comparison, aren't meant to be read sequentially – yet a huge number of repealed Swiss decrees are still published as PDFs, which are ideal for printing out but a disaster for subsequent use in digital systems.
Even the new Akoma Ntoso schema, which is supposed to be implemented for Swiss federal legislation in the future, is structured in much the same way as a book, with one XML file per piece of legislation. There was an interesting discussion on this topic recently in a colloquium at the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Law: “Maschinelle Gesetzestextanalyse – neue Möglichkeiten für die Rechtsetzungslehre?” (Machine-based legal text analysis – new opportunities for legislative studies?) One speaker was in favor of the Akoma Ntoso format; the other was against it due to analytical limitations.
What does compliance have to do with all of this?
Everyone is talking about legal tech and digitalization. It’s important to make the relevant information available so that it can be evaluated digitally. This is particularly the case in the area of compliance, which still has high potential for automation. So the question arises: when will statute books and other legal sources be replaced by databases?
