If you have ever prepared for competitive exams and are looking for the legislation that you have to prepare for or need to consult a law for any management, you will have already realized that the Official State Gazette is a pain. (also applies to regional versions) to find out what is current and what has changed: transpositions, various PDFs, annexes and cross references that make you go crazy.
You are not alone: sooner or later it has happened to everyone. Until now you only had two alternatives: consult with someone who did know about the subject to clear your doubts or resort to artificial intelligence to then carefully check that nothing is left out. To the computer engineer Enrique Lopez It must have happened to him too and he took action on the matter.
The project. Is called Legalize and it is in a few words a digital repository of state and regional legislation available on GitHub, as if it were a computer project. Thus, it has translated more than 12,000 regulations in force in the state (both state and regional), each one into a Markdown file with plain text on which you can search for what interests you.
In addition, each of the laws are grouped in folders based on their jurisdiction. In short: one law, one file, one folder, one jurisdiction. The organization follows the standard ELI (European Legislation Identifier). As the project’s GitHub explains, all content comes from the BOE Consolidated Legislation APIthe text of the legislation is public domain. What Legalize-es provides is structure, version control and metadata.
What has changed about this law. But the laws have their drafts, consolidated texts and subsequent reforms, so sometimes being clear about what is in force and what is not is an odyssey. So you added each reform as a commit, with the actual publication date. This way, even if you have no idea about laws, you can see what exactly has changed in the regulations: in red is what is deleted and in green is what is added. We see it better with an example, that of Royal Decree-Law 8/2010:
Royal Decree-Law 8/2010
Why is it important. Beyond the practicality of access of this format, the true relevance is that anyone can know what has changed in a law without tricks or cardboard. It is true that the BOE is public, but it is far from friendly. On the other hand, when a law is reformed, it is easy to lose sight of previous regulations. With this format it is easy to know what has changed and when.
Context. In a state like Spain where the normative production report of the CEOE for 2024 (the last one released) lists 719 regulations, being up to date with regulations that affect matters as important as taxes or retirement is an arduous task. The digitization of current legal regulations is a pending issue that this project addresses as a civic hack: using technology to simplify and clarify what the administration hinders.
How it works. The core of legalize-es is the automation of legislative data through a pipeline, that is, with a “robot” that periodically monitors the BOE’s Consolidated Legislation API. The system extracts the text from the official PDF and cleans it of strange formats, leaving it in plain text. Once processed, the law is integrated into a Git version control system where each reform does not overwrite the previous one, but is saved as a new layer to allow access to the history of changes, which allows traceability.
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