In my fight to make technical standards that have the force of law at the federal level available, I had uncovered a huge missing gap in the Code of Federal Regulations. I have estimated that over 30 percent of the Code of Federal Regulations is simply not available for citizens to read without incurring great expense and getting permission first from a private party. Those are the model codes and standards that are “incorporated by reference” into regulations, having the full force of law, but not being actually contained in the itself. The purpose of this mechanism was originally to save space, but it has become an opportunity to limit access and derive unjust rents from citizens by private organizations.
The question of public printing of the law is one that I have long had an interest in for the United States, to the extent of having thrown my name into the pool to be considered as Public Printer of the United States, the senior official charged with promulgating the law at the federal level and the director of the Government Printing Office. I didn’t get the job, but I was on the shortlist and got to see firsthand how the Office of Presidential Personnel in the White House works, and I learned an awful lot about the Printing Office, so the experience was very much worthwhile.
Because of my interest in public printing, I also had contacts around the world with people who worked in this area, such as John Sheridan, who created probably the best system in the world for promulgation of the law under the auspices of the National Archives of the United Kingdom. It is a wonderful system, allowing one to pull up a definitive text for all laws ever enacted in England. You can actually pull up the text of Magna Carta as enacted and reenacted and see it change over time as it was amended.
In India, the question of access to the law has become more visible. Two lawyers at the firm of Nishith Desai Associates, Gowree Gokhale and Jaideep Reddy, published an insightful piece in Vantage Asia Magazine on “a push for procedural certainty” in which they outlined many examples of ambiguity in being able to ascertain the status of regulations and statutes. My friend and co-petitioner on the standards case, Sushant Sinha, with his online free collection of all court cases and laws at Indian Kanoon, had also taken a deep interest in the subject. Srinivas Kodali, our other co-petitioner on the standards case, had been the one that had kicked off the collection of official gazettes.
We were not alone. In September of 2017, the Honorable Justice Manmohan of the High Court of Delhi had heard about the status of access to the law for a case he was hearing and had ordered the Ministry of Law to come up with a
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