On 23 March 2010 14:33, Russ Garrett <[email protected]> wrote: > > If you just want number of acts, searching by year on > http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk will tell you how many pieces of > legislation there were which matched your query (although it will only > display the first 500).
And alas only those in force when the database was set up - lots of repealed legislation will not turn up. Although a surprising amount does remain if only in small part - for example the Copyright Act 1911 still exists in 3 substantive sections (albeit one of them gives its short title). You would want to consult a chronological table of statutes to really check. The only database of statutes- as-passed going back that way is (a) paid for and (b) the most annoying website I use with any regularity (Justis) and with the most irritating sales force (I once explored how much extra I'd have to pay them never to have to speak to a salesperson again to no useful effect). Justis is probably painful to scrape and almost certainly contrary to whatever agreement one has going with it to do so. On the plus side - its so awful that it won't let you search for an act. It returns all "parts" of an act that satisfy the search criteria, including the preamble and a title page, so for any year it would return: total no of sections+2 * no of acts for that year. I am *way* too unwell to explore this very far, but to give some numbers of hits (for specific years): 1911: 780 1921: 948 1931: 635 1941: 639 1951: 978 1961: 1287 1971: 2132 1981: 2183 1991: 2184 2001: 2337 The 20th century (i.e. using Dionysius Exiguus' origin, so 1900-1999): 146,037 2000-2010: 40,222 So about 28% of the total of output of primary legislation in the 20th century. That's a lot but not nearly as fast a growth as one might imagine - and after all they did have a few wars and things early on in C20 that might have distracted a little. Yes: I'm not counting statutory instruments and rules - I'm not sure that I can easily do that. But the more recent figures will probably include Acts of the Scottish Parliament, which may bias things the other way (easier to produce more legislation when you have more than one legislature at it). Also while acts tended to be shorter in the parts, *sections* tended to be longer to the point of looking like winners of obfuscated C contests. Justis has records for 211,318 separate bits of "legislation" in the 20th century, and 65,433 bits in 2000-2010 (where a bit is a section, preamble, paragraph of schedule, title etc). That will underestimate the older stuff which was not always passed in a regular way - whereas *almost* everything now is an SI or SR. Conclusion: whoever contacted Seb has been sold a line of nonsense. > > It would be an interesting site to scrape, although the legislation > itself is all Crown Copyright. I did write a scraper (which is somewhere around) for the old opsi site, that managed a great deal of legislation and tried to parse it down to the section etc level. It was a ghastly thing because the html produced was truly dreadful, inconsistent and in some cases not even vaguely html. I mentioned this to a girl working for opsi last year and she rolled her eyes at the prospect. I'd quite like to see something like that done (or do it) for what we have now but I'm waiting while opsi people do the work they are doing. An increasing amount of stuff is going to be available in sensible formats without us having to scrape anything. Seems sensible to see what it is. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
