V David Zvenyach vdavez

An Experiment in Government Innovation—Legal Hackers in Residence

In the last two years, my office has been working with civic hackers—Code for DC, DC Legal Hackers, and others—and organizations like US ODI and the OpenGov Foundation to build open-source tools to make DC’s law more accessible. Increasingly, we are working to expand our efforts and join with partner cities through the Free Law Founders. I’ve even learned to code in Python, Node, and am learning Ruby.

In the last year, though, I had a realization: it is time to bring the hackers in-house. It is time for government lawyers to embrace innovation and to retool our practice for the digital age. We need to stop using bad tools—or worse paying overpriced vendors for proprietary software that works some of the time—and instead work with developers. In turn, instead of building one-off applications and fighting with legal teams, developers can be a

	levels:
	- form: '$x.'
	num: 1
	- form: '$x.'
	num: A
	- form: ($x)
	num: 1

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<ordinance
	xmlns="http://example.com/"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://example.com/"
	xml:base="http://example.com"
	identifier="usml-cities/v1">
	<meta>
	<docNumber>Ordinance No</docNumber>
	<property name="file number">File No</property>
	</meta>

	levels:
	- form: '###$x.'
	num: I
	- form: '$x.'
	num: A
	- form: ($x)
	num: 1

	// Take a PDF file & make JSON out of it.
	// USAGE: node app.js -f filename.pdf -o filename.json

	var fs = require('fs'),
	path = require('path'),
	exec = require('child_process').exec,
	argv = require('minimist')(process.argv.slice(2));

	function run(filename, output) {
	var data = {}

	levels:
	- form: '###$x.'
	num: I
	- form: '$x.'
	num: A
	- form: ($x)
	num: 1

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Foo</title>
	<meta charset='utf-8' />
	<meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0' />
	<style type='text/css'>
	body {
	font-family: 'Ubuntu';
	letter-spacing:-5px;

	sudo yum update -y
	sudo yum install -y gnupg2

	cd ~
	sudo yum install -y wget zlib-dev openssl-devel sqlite-devel bzip2-devel rng-tools
	wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.6/Python-2.7.6.tgz
	tar -xzf ~/Python-2.7.6.tgz
	cd Python-2.7.6
	./configure --prefix=/usr/local
	sudo make

	var servo = require('servojs')
	var cheerio = require('cheerio')
	var scotus_page = 'http://scotus-bookmarks.herokuapp.com/urls/'
	var request = require('request')
	var out = []
	var statusArray = []
	var fs = require('fs')

	servo.getElementsFromPage(scotus_page, "tr", runThrElems)