Frankenstein Bill

This is a Frankenstein Bill consisting of fragments of laws from many jurisdictions - both primary and secondary.

The BIus Project

This bill is being created as part of the BIus project - Basic Lawmaking for Legislative Computer Systems.

Gordon Guthrie (gordon.guthrie@gov.scot) is a Research Fellow at the Scottish Government under the First Minister’s Digital Fellowship programme. To take part in the research and follow its progress please subscribe to the Digital Policy newsletter (free, can unsubscribe at any time).

Purpose

The purpose of this bill is to provide an explanatory guide as to how primary and secondary legislation constrains services delivered in whole or in part digitally.

This Frankenstein Bill is primarily aimed at policy makers and legislators who are not technical experts. The goal is to draw out implications for different professional practices of common legislative issues. The expectation is that the examples will be provided by technologists, service designers, content designers, organisation designers, testers and service managers.

Adding Your Own Examples

You can clone this git repo and raise a PR in the normal way. (If you are not a git user you can also email me gordon.guthrie@gov.scot with your examples).

In either case please follow the simple format here - an extract from a piece of legislation (with a link to the whole thing with mention of the jurisdiction) and then a separate explanation of the issue.

Please read the existing Frankenstein Bill to see if there is an existing example. If your example is not different enough from an existing one to warrant a new entry, consider adding it as a variant with a new clause on the Act side and some additional text bringing out the salient differences.

If your legislation is in a language other than English please add both the orginal text and a translation of it. Don’t worry too much about legal fidelity of the translation, if anybody does turn this bill into law we are all doomed.

During the development of digitial services, speedbumps have been often removed. If this is the case in your example, please provide appropriate links to how this was done.

See the chapter on alogrithms for an example of one that addresses all the issues raised in this section.

Quality

The target reader of this Bill is a policy person, minister, parliamentarian or parliamentary or political aid.

Chapters in this bill should be of an approriate quality to:

enable readers to track down the origional code being discussed in its full context
understand the history of the clause
if the clause is no longer extant, the reader should be able to get an understanding of how and when it came to be changed

In addition the chapters should be seen as specific examples of a general type of clause - and the reader should be given enough information to be able to recognise other examples in their own experience.

Frankenstein Bill