Many people remember from middle school the movie on how a bill becomes a law, but few civics courses teach about what happens afterward. On Monday, John, Josh, and I sat down with members of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Their job, in short, is to consolidate and codify laws passed by Congress [...]

As the research of the Harvard Transparency Policy Project has made abundantly clear, applying the principles of openness and transparency to complex systems demands a careful approach to epistemic nuances; questions like what should be knowable to whom need to be answered before disclosure requirements are implemented, and need to be built into a disclosure [...]

After going through the trouble of obtaining and digitizing the 1992 report on congressional documentation, I’ve started going systematically through the document, and, in an attempt to read more closely, have been taking notes.  This is a long post, but the parallels with the Open House Project are startling to me, as are the contrasts: [...]

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution.
My basic point was that members of Congress have certain privileges granted by the Constitution, giving them freedom from legal action relating to their legislative duties. Congress members aren’t above the law, so only legislative acts qualify as [...]

Among my favorite blogs lately has been Future Perfect, apparently a Nokia researcher’s personal brainstorming repository. I enjoy it so much because it reminds me of how I take notes, through either practical categorization or an off-the-cuff to-be-revisited kind of personalized conceptual banter that “Future Perfect” offers frequently. I find this refreshing because [...]