Digitising legislation: progress and prospects

This chapter looks at the development of the technology that has been applied to producing legislation, and considers where that may lead – what might be achieved as we move further in digitising legislation? The chapter looks at the effects of the move from paper to word processing and web publication, and at where XML systems might lead in capturing the structure of the layout and numbering of legislation. It then turns to the question of capturing the logical structure of legislative provisions, and the risks of trying to capture the meanings of words used particularly when that is intended to lead to automation of the execution of the processes set out in the legislation. It describes the “Rules as Code” movement and progress in “computational law”. It considers the difficulties inherent in digitising the logic of existing current statute books, and then turns to how technology might help with drafting in future. It looks at what help might be given by generative Artificial Intelligence (and “Large Language Models”) in various tasks related to the drafting and understanding of legislation.