Taking Public Access to the Law Seriously: The Problem of Private Control Over the Availability of Federal Standards

摘要

In the 1930s, Harvard professor Erwin Griswold famously complained about the enormous numbers of New Deal regulations that were obscurely published on individual sheets or in "separate paper pamphlets." Finding these binding federal rules was difficult, leading to "chaos" and an "intolerable" situation. Congress responded, requiring that agencies publish all rules in the Federal Register and in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Currently, recent federal public laws, the entire U. S. Code, the Federal Register, and the CFR are all freely available online as well as in governmental depository libraries.