Figuring out how a law changes over time can be exceedingly difficult. In Germany, as in most countries, laws are not saved in “track changes.” Rather, to determine how a law has been amended throughout its history, one must review each and every “change-law,” like this one, which simply increases the price tag on something that was 2.5 deutschmarks to 3.5 of the defunct currency. Any given law may be accompanied by hundreds - or even thousands - of change-laws documenting its modification.

The challenge of determining how a law has been amended over time is further complicated - or facilitated - by the format in which the relevant documentation is presented. Germany’s change-laws have, until recently, been published in hardcopy. This necessitates that humans sort through the documents on their own or pay a legal researcher to do so on their behalf, erecting a sizable barrier to achieving the desired outcome. On the other hand, when legal documents are presented online in open formats, humans can use technologies to automatically sort through legal texts and identify changes to legislation.

Today, as Gregor Aisch’s interactive visualization of the version history of Germany’s political party law illustrates (pictured above), technology allows for far easier - and more practical and logical - ways of understanding changes to a law. As Gregor writes:

Since its publication in 1967 the [German political parties] law was changed several times. Sometimes entire sections had been re-written, sometimes only small parts had been corrected. Each column represents a version of the law, with the boxes representing the individual paragraphs. Changed, added and deleted articles are highlighted.

Gregor continues:

In an ideal world, the revision histories of every law would be open and accessible to be studied and analyzed by the public. But unfortunately, in Germany they’re not. So I did what I had to do and hand-scraped all past versions of one law, going back to it’s origin in 1967, and visualized it.

Gregor spent a week assembling past histories of the bill. Had the same information been available in an open and structured format, a software could have matched versions of the law to determine which changes were made, when and where. Fortunately, with the help of new tools, such as Bundesgit, future versions of the parties law (and all other German federal laws) will be available in both human- and machine-readable formats. However, unless the Bundestag decides to comply with Declaration provision 26 on Providing Access to Historical Information, other German laws will continue to remain captive to their paper past.

Thanks to Stefan Wehrmeyer for the introduction to Gregor Aisch and his fantastic work.

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness calls on parliaments to make information available “in an open and structured format… that can be read and processed by computers, so that parliamentary information can be easily reused and analyzed…” (Provision 35). To illustrate the value of open parliamentary data and potential for sharing and reuse to inform our understanding of complex data and processes, OpeningParliament.org has created the series “What Opening Parliamentary Information Can Tell Us about Our Parliaments” (check out Vol. 1 at this link). To contribute, please comment below or contact us.