Git for US Legislation

The article proposes applying version control systems similar to Git to U.S. legislation, allowing lawyers to track statutory changes with the same precision programmers use for code. Currently, U.S. law's legislative history is scattered across amendment notes and effective-date provisions, making it difficult for lawyers and language models to determine which version of a law applied at any given time. The authors demonstrate a working system that reconstructs the U.S. Code from 2017 onward, successfully matching 361 of 365 changes to official release points and clearly marking each phrase with the law and effective date that introduced it.