Machine-readable law

The unit of law becomes the provision rather than the document. Each section has an identifier that resolves, amendments apply to that identifier rather than to a page, and the state of the law at a given date is something a machine can construct rather than something a person must reconstruct.

Distinct from codification, which concerns what the law says and whether it has been consolidated. This concerns the form in which it is published. The two are independent: a chaotic body of law can be perfectly machine-readable, and a clean codification can exist only as PDFs.

It is also where legibility runs in the unusual direction, from the state to the citizen. That is the same direction Bentham wanted and could not have.