How are laws disseminated?

Question

Every day (while it is in session), Congresses passes thousands of pages of laws affecting millions of people. Most of these pages not even the legislators read. Most of the laws are obscure, in the sense that they will never hit the news or make the water cooler. How, historically, have these laws been disseminated and communicated to the people they affect? Let's take a specific example: You are a small business owner. Congress passes some law that requires you to do something -- maybe it's an HR issue, maybe it's a safety issue, maybe it pertains to something you sell, who knows. How do you find out that such a law has been passed?

Is there a clearinghouse that digests all the laws and communicates the information to those who are interested? E.g., is there someone who will tell me when anything is passed that pertains to handling ammonium nitrate, or to retail sales, or to residential wiring? Or is it all hit and miss?

Yeah, laws are published, but how many people to do you know sifting through thousands of pages of laws to find something that pertains to them? Do you really think your local gas station owner takes four (or ten) hours out of his week to review all the state and federal laws that have recently been passed?

Answer 1

You very much overestimate the amount of legislation being done in Congress. It certainly does not pass "thousands of pages of laws" "every day" -- particularly not during the current "Rubber Stamp" Congress, in which the majority party keeps acting like they're the minority party, bringing up bills for the express purpose of voting against them, and nonsense like that.

Instead, legislation is typically concerned with managing government programs and tweaking the guidelines Congress gives federal agencies for the job they're supposed to do. Most of the rule-making that affects the average person (or the small business owner in your example) is done, not by Congress, but by the agency that has been charged with rule-making in its area of specialty. Federal agencies have a regular process of rule-making that typically involves publishing or announcing a proposed rule change, providing fora for public response to the proposal, passage of the new rule, and promulgation of the rule. If your business owner runs a mine, he will already be in regular communication with the Bureau of Mines, filing reports, receiving correspondence, and so on. The mine-owner will typically learn of proposed rules or of new rules being implemented either directly from the agency or through trade organizations, which tend to devote resources to following and participating in the rule-making processes for agencies affecting their members.

I do not believe that there is any entity that attempts to match general legislation to those who might be interested, for the simple reasons that (1) general legislation affects tens or hundreds of millions of people, requiring a gargantuan effort and expense to communicate it directly to each of them, (2) it is often difficult to predict every application of a law at the time it is first passed, so there would be substantial guess-work in determining the applicable recipients for any given statute, and (3) most people care more about how they are entertained than about how they are governed, so many would regard it as a nuisance.

For a person who wants to keep abreast of federal rules and laws affecting their particular trade, they should join or at least follow the publications of national trade associations comprised of other business-people like themselves. Those organizations tend to follow rule-making in a very specific field very closely, they often interact with the rule-making agencies, and they are often involved in funneling member feedback to the agencies in question during the public feedback part of their rule-making process.

For a person who just wants to access the collection of federal laws, to search them or browse through them for some reason, they would want to look up the United States Code, which is online at several locations, including several operated by the government and a few operated by universities.

Answer 2

All states and the Federal government have published statues, or code of laws. You can perform a search, or you can print out the thousands of pages. It's a lot of JUNK; exactly why lawyers get paid what they do. Several laws are never enforced. Here in NC they just repealed a 201 year old law that said unmarried couples can't live together.

P/S - All laws are open to interpretation; nothing is black & white. Again, the reason we have lawyers.