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As it stands, the State of California has a bureau that uses software to ensure new laws do not conflict with existing ones.

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Do you have a little more information about that? I'm curious to know how the software would do that, and how sophisticated it is. I would imagine it is simply based on user input representations of the bills, and fairly simple tests, but even that would be difficult to do accurately/effectively.

I was involved in a software project there in the late 90's. Their software back then seemed to just consist of a search engine on the text of the bills. There may have been other tools I didn't know about. My project there was fairly limited.

My (probably incomplete or incorrect) understanding was that they would vet a new law by doing keyword searches concerning the main points of the new law. So if a there was a new law about people's lawns, they'd search for "lawn" and whatever other keywords or synonyms would occur to them.

Thanks. Makes sense. I was curious because I've spent much time developing quality case parsing and semantic analysis technologies, and one of the very difficult problems I've been interested in - but not yet approached - is automatically parsing and analyzing legislation. I think there is much headway that will be made there in the coming years/decade, but it's a tricky problem.

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