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Subject: On the redline example by Grant
Dear all,
here you can find some reflections about Grant's example of redlining. It is a complex example, and it was made more complex because of the sometimes implicit assumptions that underlie any bill about existing legislation. I will try to clarify (at least in my mind) such assumptions and I hope to show that the relative solution is a bit simpler than proposed.
First of all, the setting: there is an enacted piece of legislation, that as of today reads as follows:
<article id="artIV" period="p1">
<section id="sec9">
<num>SEC. 9.</num>
<content>
<p>A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in its title.
If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in its title, only the part not
expressed is void. A statute may not be amended by reference to its title.</p>
<p>A section of a statute may not be amended unless the section is re-enacted as
amended.</p>
</content>
</section>
<section id="sec14">
<num>SEC. 14</num>
<content>
<p>A member of the Legislature is not subject to civil process during a session of
the Legislature or for 5 days before and after a session. </p>
</content>
</section>
</article>
Since this is enacted legislation, it is in force now and has been since some day in the past, suppose January 1st 2012. So these fragments are associated to a temporalGroup in the past as follows:
<temporalData source="#FV">
<temporalGroup id="p1">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" />
</temporalGroup>
</temporalData>
Now we are discussing about a bill that plans to amend the enacted legislation. This being a bill, it is NOT yet in force, and no modification exists yet of the enacted legislation, but it is all only planned. In its first drafting the bill proposes one modification:
1) to split the first paragraph of section 9 into two separate ones.
Let us first suppose that the amendment gets approved as stated on September 1st, 2012. The result in the enacted law can be expressed in many ways. One, quite correct but quite cumbersome, has been proposed by Grant:
<p period="#p1">A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in
its title. If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in its title, only the
part not expressed is void. <span period="#p2">A statute may not be amended by
reference to its title.</span></p>
<p period="#p3">A statute may not be amended by reference to its title.</p>
<p period="#p1">A section of a statute may not be amended unless the section is
re-enacted as amended.</p>
with temporalData as follows:
<temporalData source="#FV">
<temporalGroup id="p1">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" />
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p2">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" end="2012-09-01"/>
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p3">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-09-01" />
</temporalGroup>
</temporalData>
This is cumbersome because it requires that the split text be present twice, once as removed and the second time as inserted. A different approach would be the following:
<p>A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in its title. If
a statute embraces a subject not expressed in its title, only the part not
expressed is void.</p>
<p period="#p3"><span period="#p1">A statute may not be amended by reference to its
title.</span></p>
<p period="#p1">A section of a statute may not be amended unless the section is
re-enacted as amended.</p>
with temporalData:
<temporalData source="#FV">
<temporalGroup id="p1">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" />
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p3">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-09-01" />
</temporalGroup>
</temporalData>
It is a dirty trick, because I hide a span with "old" content in a p with "new" content, but it seems to work.
Anyway, the enacted legislation will only be changed as a result of the enactment of a modification act resulting from the promulgation of this bill. How would such modification act look like? (THE EVENTUAL ACT, NOT THE BILL). If it was approved now, it should look something like the following, considering the typographical requirements of the State of California:
<section id="sec1">
<content>
<p>
<mod id="mod1">That <ref href="ENACTED#sec9" id="ref1">section 9 of Article
IV</ref> is amended to read:
<quotedStructure id="mod1-qs1">
<section id="mod1-qs1-sec9">
<num>SEC. 9.</num>
<content>
<p period="#p1">A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be
expressed in its title. If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in
its title, only the part not expressed is void. <del>A statute</del></p>
<p period="#p3"><span period="#p1"><ins>A statute</ins> may not be amended by
reference to its title. </span></p>
<p period="#p1">A section of a statute may not be amended unless the section
is re-enacted as amended.</p>
</content>
</section>
</quotedStructure></mod>
</p>
</content>
</section>
Here you can see that the organization of the p elements and their period attributes are identical to the eventual new version of the enacted act and it is independent of the ins and del elements, which are there just as editorial helps for the presentation: the del is shown as deleted text, the ins is shown as inserted text. The actual validity period of the del and ins fragments are not relevant, because they do not belong to the enacted law, but are used as editorial aids for display purposes. Quoting from the Akoma Ntoso documentation:
"the element ins is an inline element for the specification of editorial insertions"
"the element del is an inline element for the specification of editorial deletions".
So far, so good. But the last fragment is not yet of the amending act, but of a proposed bill that still has no efficacy, and no effect on the enacted law. As such the end date of period p2 and the start date of period p3 have not been determined yet, and I will set them at an arbitrary date in the future, as follows:
<temporalData source="#FV">
<temporalGroup id="p1">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" />
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p2">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" end="9999-12-31"/>
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p3">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="9999-12-31" />
</temporalGroup>
</temporalData>
Furthermore, the amending bill is itself undergoing changes, and a new version of the bill is created, with ITS OWN temporal data and validity periods. Suppose that version 1 of the bill was created on June 1st, 2012, and version 2 of the bill was created on July 1st, 2012.
The second version of the bill does three modifications to the first one:
1) The split paragraph starting with "A statute" is joined back with its previous one.
2) The lone paragraph starting with "A section of a statute" is also joined with the first one.
3) A new section is added, with modifications to section 14 of the same Article. This also implies that numbering appears suddenly in both sections of the amending bill.
Placing temporal information correctly is very important now. We have two separate temporal planes, completely independent of each other. The first one affects the enacted piece of legislation, and is composed of the following periods:
p1 (unchanged fragments): from the start date of the old version of the enacted law to the future
p2 (deleted fragments): from the start date of the old version to the start date of the new version of the enacted law
p3 (inserted fragments): from the start date of the new version of the enacted law to the future
Crossing these periods, we have a number of corresponding periods for the amending bill:
p101 (unchanged fragments): from the start date of the amending bill to the future
p102 (deleted fragments): from the start date of the fist version to the start date of the second version of the amending bill
p103 (inserted fragments): from the start date of the second version of the amending bill to the future.
Then the temporalData block now looks like:
<temporalData source="#FV">
<temporalGroup id="p1">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" />
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p2">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-01-01" end="9999-12-31"/>
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p3">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="9999-12-31" />
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p101">
<timeInterval refersTo="#drafting" start="2012-06-01" />
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p102">
<timeInterval refersTo="#efficacy" start="2012-06-01" end="2012-07-01"/>
</temporalGroup>
<temporalGroup id="p103">
<timeInterval refersTo="#drafting" start="2012-07-01" />
</temporalGroup>
</temporalData>
while the text of the bill looks like:
<section id="sec1" period="#p101">
<num period="#p103">First</num>
<content>
<p>
<mod id="mod1">That <ref id="ref1" href="ENACTEDv1#sec9">section 9 of Article
IV</ref> is amended to read:
<quotedStructure id="mod1-qs1">
<section id="mod1-qs1-sec9">
<num>SEC. 9.</num>
<content>
<p period="#p1">A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be
expressed in its title. If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in
its title, only the part not expressed is <del period="#p103">void.
</del><del period="#p102">A statute</del></p>
<p period="#p102"><span period="#p1"><ins period="#p103">void. A statute</ins>
<ins period="#p102">A statute</ins> may not be amended by reference to its
<del period="#p103">title.</del></span></p>
<p period="#p2"><ins period="#p103">title. </ins><span period="#p1"><ins>A
section</ins> of a statute may not be amended unless the section is
re-enacted as amended.</p>
</content>
</section>
</quotedStructure></mod>
</p>
</content>
</section>
<section id="sec2" period="#p103">
<num><ins>Second</ins></num>
<content>
<p>
<mod id="mod2"><ins>That <ref id="ref2" href="ENACTEDv1#sec14">section 14 of Article IV</ref> is amended to read:</ins>
<quotedStructure id="mod2-qs1">
<section id="mod2-qs1-sec14">
<num>SEC. 14.</num>
<content>
<p period="#p1">A member of the Legislature is not subject to civil process
during a session of the Legislature or for <span period="#p2">5</span>
<span period="#p3">10</ins> days before and after a session. </p>
</content>
</section>
</quotedStructure></mod>
</p>
</content>
</section>
Let's comment this (I may have done some mistakes with identifiers). Easy things first:
* Section 1 of the bill has period p101 because it existed in the first version of the bill and still exists.
* The num element of section 1 of the bill has period p103 because it was created in the second version of the bill
* Section 2 of the bill has period p103 for the same reason.
* The numbers 5 and 10 in section 14 of the enacted law have periods p2 and p3 because they are to be activated only when and if the bill gets promulgated.
More complicated things now in section 9:
* the first paragraph has period p1 (always existing)
* the second paragraph has period p102 (it will not exist in the enacted law anymore, but it existed in the first version of the bill and now disappears) but its content still has period p1, as it will continue to exist (but in the previous paragraph).
* The third paragraph has period p2 (it will be deleted from the law) but its content will continue to exist (in the previous paragraph).
* Word "void." has period p103, i.e. it is shown as deleted starting from version 2 of the bill
* Words "A statute" in the first paragraph have period p102, i.e., disappear in version 2 of the bill
* Words "void. A statute" in the second paragraph have period p103, i.e., appear in version 2 of the bill
* Words "A statute" in the second paragraph have period p102, i.e. disappears in version 2 of the bill
I hope I have considered all the cases. This is a complex example, and possibly I have lost some bits here and there.
I hope you can make something of this mess.
Ciao
Fabio
--
Fabio Vitali Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna ITALY Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
phone: +39 051 2094872 Man got to tell himself he understand.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/
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