12 Tables of Codes

12 Tables of Codes
Twelve Tables of Codes
Directory of Tables
Table 01
Table of Codes
Table 02
Table of Authorities
Table 03
Table of Revenue and Remuneration
Table 04
Table of Pricing Variances
Table 05
Table of Procurement
Table 06
Table of Production
Table 07
Table of Reverse Lookup
Table 08
Table of Works Consulted
Table 09
Table of Tweets
Table 10
Table of Transformative Use
Table 11
Table of Official Proceedings
Table 12
Table of Requests for Comment
§ 1. The Right To Know
The right to know the law, so as not to be ignorant, as ignorance
of the law is no excuse.
The right to speak the law, so as to inform the citizenry.
The right to know and speak the law is the underpinning of
government in ancient and modern times. The right to know and speak the
law is the foundation of the doctrine of the Rule of Law, which
provides:
First, that the laws shall be public, that the arbitrary whims
of individual men and women have no place in a society ruled by law.
We declare ourselves to be nations of laws, not empires of men.
Second, that the laws shall apply equally to all. There shall
not be one minimum wage for people of color and another for white
people. There shall not be one court for men and another for women.
The vote shall not be reserved for the rich, disenfranchising the poor
with poll taxes or other artificial barriers meant to come between a
people and their government.
Third, that there shall be due process under the law.
Judgment shall only be applied after a fair and open proceeding; you
shall know the charges levied against you and shall be provided
counsel, so that you may be heard.
When we fail to live up to the Rule of Law, we have failed as a
society. Despots may make excuses about extraordinary times or states
of emergency, but those reasons are given sheepishly and accepted
grudgingly, as we all know that a government that fails to live by the
Rule of Law is one that will eventually face the springtime of revolt.
§ 2. The Rule of Law
In the early days of the Roman Republic, the commoners rose
against their aristocratic masters and demanded that the laws by which
they would be judged should be made known. When the aristocrats
resisted, preferring to impose the law arbitrarily, the people quit
the city of Rome, leaving the city defenseless and without workers to
keep it running.
The great secession led in 450 BCE to the
promulgation of the Twelve Tables of Law, which were inscribed on
bronze tablets and placed in the agoras for all to read. All citizens
were expected to read and know the law, indeed when the Gauls burnt
the city in 390 BCE and the tablets were destroyed, all the schoolchildren
were able to recite them from memory and they were easily
reconstructed.
That the laws shall be written down and promulgated for all to
know was a universal value. In Greece, the laws of Solon were
inscribed on wooden cylinders and placed in the markets. Aristotle
stated in
Politics
that “the
rule of law…is preferable to that of any individual…[H]e
who bids the law rule may be deemed to bid God and Reason alone rule,
but he who bids man rule adds an element of the beast; for desire is a
wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they
are the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire.”
In India, Ashoka the Great ruled from 269 BCE to 231 BCE and
inscribed the Code of the Dhamma on 50-foot pillars of stone
throughout the land, declaring in Edict Number 4 “that there
should be uniformity in law and uniformity in sentencing.”
Ashoka appointed Dhamma Officers who went out into the provinces,
reading the edicts aloud to the people and helping them to understand
his laws.
That the law should be known to all was fundamental, but equally
important was that the law should not be for sale. When the Barons of
England confronted King John in 1215 on the meadow of Runnymede, one
of their chief complaints was that access to the courts had become
matter of access to money and that judgments were for sale to those
who chose to pay for them. This led to the most long-lasting
provision of Magna Carta, one still in force in the United Kingdom
and many other common law jurisdictions:
Article 40: “To no one will we sell—to no one will we deny
or delay—access to right or justice.”
Likewise, in Japan, the 7th-century Prince Shokotu
recognized that access to the law and justice should not be a matter
of access to money. In the 17-Article Constitution, which is also
still in effect, he instructed all Ministers and officials of state to
observe the principles he set out:
Article 5: “Of complaints brought by the people there are a
thousand in one day. If in one day there are so many, how many will
there be in a series of years? If the man who is to decide suits at
law makes gain his ordinary motive, and hears causes with a view to
receiving bribes, then will the suits of the rich man be like a stone
flung into water while the complaints of the poor will resemble water
cast upon a stone. Under these circumstances the poor man will not
know where to take their complaints.”
That all people should know their duties was
expressed in China in the first printed book,
The Diamond Sutra,
which
was dedicated to “universal free distribution.” In the
Chinese Buddhist tradition, one gains merit by copying or printing.
The writing of the laws began in China in 536 BCE, when Xing Shu
inscribed the code of punishments on a bronze tripod for all to see.
Then, 20 years later a neighboring state inscribed the laws on an iron
tripod, then private citizens copied them onto bamboo. For the next
millennium, the Chinese government balanced the Confucian precepts of
rule-by-man with the codified principles of rule-by-law.
As new governments were formed to throw off colonial and dynastic yokes,
equality under the law and government by Rule of Law became guiding
principles. The U.S. Constitution enshrined equality and due process
into the fabric of the newly United States. John Adams explained in
his
Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law
that the key to
making this experiment in democracy work would be the participation of
an informed citizenry:
“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of
knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every
order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate
their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and
principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the
law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution;
read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of
Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British
ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind
against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary
kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and
hell.”
An informed citizenry requires the
freedom to read and write the law. When the issue came before the U.S.
Supreme Court, it ruled unanimously in
Wheaton v.
Peters
(1834) that the law belonged to the people, not to the
government and certainly not to private citizens, stating “no
reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions
delivered by this Court.”
The principle that the law belongs to the people was repeatedly
affirmed. In
Banks v. Manchester
(1888), the Supreme Court rejected
copyright claims over state court opinions. In
Veeck v. Southern Bldg.
Code Congress
(2002), the 5th Circuit of the Court of Appeals rejected
copyright claims over model building codes that were incorporated into
law in Texas, stating “[P]ublic ownership of the law means
precisely that ‘the law’ is in the ‘public
domain’ for whatever use the citizens choose to make of
it.”
In the 20th Century, governments all over the world have
repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of the Rule of Law and of
fundamental human rights, which include the right to know what our
governments require of us. This right has been particularly
important in the formation of the European Union. Article 15 of the
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union emphasized the
“right of access to documents of the Union's
institutions,” the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European
Union guarantees a “right of access to documents,“ and the
Treaty of Amsterdam firmly reaffirmed the principle:
Article 1: “The Union is founded on the principles of
liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,
and the rule of law, principles which are common to the Member
States.”
The courts in Europe have repeatedly reaffirmed these principles.
In the United Kingdom, for example, in
Blackpool v. Locker
(1948), the
King's Bench refused to enforce regulations that were not
available for the public to read. In
Fothergill v. Monarch Airlines
(1981), the House of Lords stated that “the need for legal
certainty demands that the rules by which the citizen is bound should
be ascertainable by him.” In
Sunday Times v. United Kingdom
(1979), the European Court of Human Rights stated that “[T]he
law must be adequately accessible: the citizen must be able to have an
indication that is adequate in the circumstances of the legal rules
applicable to a given case.”
The Rule of Law is not a concept limited to western or northern countries,
to developed countries, or any other lines drawn that divide our
world into sectors. The Rule of Law unites our world around a basic truth, that all
human beings have basic rights. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states:
Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes … to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
The rights of speech and expression are fundamental to any declaration
of human rights. The right of access to justice is equally fundamental.
There can be no human rights in any meaningful sense if we limit who is
allowed to read the law and who is allowed to speak it. Human rights
begin with all citizens knowing their duties and their rights under the law.
§ 3. Code is Law
Law has always been technical. Regulation of public safety and the
promotion of standards for fair trade have always stood hand-in-hand
with the regulation of the procedures of justice. When the Barons at
Runnymede forced King John to agree to Magna Carta, the articles
guaranteeing access to justice came right after the article
proclaiming a system of uniform weights and measures:
Article 35: “Let there be throughout our kingdom a single
measure for wine and a single measure for ale and a single measure for
corn, namely ‘the London quarter,’ and a single width of
cloth (whether dyed, russet or halberjet) namely two ells within the
selvedges and let it be the same with weights and measures.”
England was not unique. In most of the ancient edicts of
government, we see the regulation of technology for public safety
and the promotion of trade sitting alongside the procedures
of justice, the functioning of the divisions of government, and other constitutional issues. In Ashoka's Second
Edict he made provisions for the availability of important medical
roots and fruits; in other edicts he established systems of irrigation
and safe roads. In early Irish law we see provisions of family law sit
alongside standards for beekeeping and the proper functioning of
watermills.
As our modern era began, the provision of the public safety became
an increasingly important function of government. Railways helped open
up the United States, but at a tremendous cost in lives from manual
hand brakes and link-and-pin couplers for the cars. With the passage
of the Railroad Safety Appliance in 1893, the number of accidents fell
dramatically as air brakes and automatic couplers became required on
all trains.
In American cities, children were dying because milk was being
adulterated with fillers such as chalk and kept in grossly unsanitary
conditions. With the passage of the Food Act of 1899, the Board of
Agriculture was finally able to issue the 1901 Sale of Milk
Regulations, establishing standards of purity and hygiene, followed
soon after by the Federal Foods and Drugs Act of 1906 which
established the Food and Drug Administration.
Perhaps the most significant of the public safety regulations at
the turn of the century were the fire codes. The impetus was the
horrific New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, where the exit
doors were locked shut and 146 garment workers died from fire and
smoke, many of them leaping to their deaths from the 10th floor of the
factory, a scene so horrific that an observer called it “the day
it rained children.”
The fire led to the creation of a Committee on Public Safety led
by Frances Perkins, and with the backing of Tammany Hall's Al Smith,
to the promulgation of mandatory fire codes. Since then, groups such
as the National Fire Protection Association have created the high
quality building, fire, electrical, and other public safety codes
required throughout the world. When those codes are ignored, we see
tragedies such as the Bangladesh Tazreen Fashions fire of 2012, a fire
that bore a striking and horrifying resemblance to the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire 101 years earlier.
In our modern world, public safety regulations are a key function
of government. Natural gas and oil, for example, power our modern
cities, but those substances can cause grave harm. In the United
States, we learned this repeatedly when the Texas City refinery
explosion of 2005 killed 15 and injured 170, when the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill of 2010 threw 4.9 billion gallons of oil into the
Gulf, and when a 30-inch gas pipeline in San Bruno, California,
exploded and sent a blast of fire 1,000 feet high.
Technical regulations encompass a huge swathe of our modern life,
a natural outcome of our technical society. Building and other codes,
food safety, hazardous materials, the environment, occupational safety
in factories and farms, and the safety of products are all subject to
these regulations. While some may argue there is too much regulation
and others argue there is too little, before we can have that
discussion the citizenry must be informed.
§ 4. Indefensible Thunderbolts
Ignorantia juris non excusat
is the well-established
doctrine that ignorance of the law is no excuse. That citizens must be
notified of the laws that affect them was the genesis of the Federal
Register, an official gazette of the United States, established after
the Supreme Court ruled in the
Hot Oil Case
(1935) that regulations
that the government failed to publish were not valid. Notification of
the citizenry of their rights and responsibilities is a requirement of lawmaking.
In most of the world, including the United States, there has
arisen a system for technical laws known as incorporation by
reference. The standards governing topics such as building codes or
hazardous material transport are developed by ostensibly private
bodies. The government then publishes a notice in an Official Gazette
incorporating these standards into the law, but the
text of the standards must often be purchased from a private body.
The private bodies that develop these standards have been
delegated law-making authority from their governments. In most cases,
these private bodies are created by their governments. The British
Standards Institution, for example, was created by a Royal Charter in
1929 and represents the United Kingdom in numerous international
forums, including the International Organization for Standardization
(which it helped create) and the European Union's European Committee
for Standardization (CEN). As the duly delegated agent for this form of European Union regulation, the
British Standards Institution is required to adopt and publish EU
standards without change, making the law available to citizens. The
official United Kingdom repository of statutes lists hundreds of statutory
instruments that mention British Standards Institution documents.
While technical standards have the force of law, the governmental
bodies that promulgate these standards and a series of nonprofit
organizations that have sprung up besides them all to often maintain that the laws
are their private property and can only be accessed after paying a
fee. More insidiously, these organizations maintain that they continue
to own the documents even after you have paid the fee, exercising
controls such as restricting the ability to print the document, or
copy it, or even to quote excerpts without their case-by-case prior
written approval.
These restrictions on use are implemented through a number of
techniques. Many standards are only available in a shrink-wrap
license, an agreement that claims that by opening the packaging the
reader agrees that they don't own the document but only
“license” it and agree not to redistribute or quote
without permission. For online distribution, many standards come with
Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that ties the document to a
specific computer and restricts the ability to copy text from the
standard or print it.
These restrictions on use are proclaimed loudly and prominently,
with watermarks being put on every page of some documents purchased, strident
terms of use, and publicity campaigns reminiscent of the “FBI
Warnings” stamped on the beginning of many movies. But, there is
a world of difference between a privately created movie and a legal
document carrying out the edicts of government. To proclaim ownership
of edicts of government is a false proclamation, what is known in the
law as the
Doctrine of Brutum Fulmen,
the use of an
indefensible thunderbolt to make others give up their rights under the
law.
The law belongs to the people, and cannot become the private property
of some governmental or non-governmental organization, no matter how seemingly
well-deserved are the rents one could extract from winning a monopoly
concession on a parcel of the law. While standards
bodies need money to carry out their valuable work, and while it is clear
that these standards bodies create high-quality documents that are
essential to our public safety, one cannot cordon off the public
domain simply because of an institutional desire for funds.
An examination of the financial status of standards organizations
reveals a wide variation in composition and revenue streams. In India,
for example, less than 4% of revenue at the Bureau of Indian Standards
(BIS) comes from the sales of documents. BIS, like the British
Standards Institution, Underwriters Laboratories, Standards New
Zealand, and many other organizations throughout the world, have a
thriving business in certification and testing.
Some standards bodies, such as the National Fire Protection
Association and the International Organization for Standardization,
depend more heavily on the sale of standards documents. However, even
in these cases there are many other revenue streams and there are
opportunities to adjust the business models to more properly reflect
the importance of their work throughout society. And, in many cases,
there is room for a fresh look at expenses, such as million-dollar CEO
salaries, some of the highest salaries in the non-profit world.
Not all standards bodies have become addicted to these copious
revenues that accompany these indefensible thunderbolts. In some countries, such as
Thailand, Indonesia, and Ecuador, standards are freely available to
citizens as a matter of public policy. Many standards bodies thrive on
an open standards model, including key areas such as all the standards
that govern the operation of the Internet created by the Internet
Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, and the food
safety standards promulgated in the Codex Alimentarius by the World
Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations.
One of the most insidious aspects of the current system is the
wide variance of the price of standards. A basket of 11 public safety
standards published by the International Organization for
Standardization and also required by the European Union was assembled
and priced by Public.Resource.Org in the retail outlets of 42 national standards bodies. Even
within the European Union the prices varied wildly, from $175 in the Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to $2628
for the same standards in
the United Kingdom. Because access to the standards (and the national forwards to
the standards) is vital for economic activity across national borders,
the opportunistic pricing by money-hungry standards bodies becomes a
tall barrier to trade.
While extracting a tax on each reader of a standards document is an impediment to the
Rule of Law, the restriction on reuse of the documents is even more
serious. The law is the raw material of democracy, and being able to
work with these documents to create better ways to inform the
citizenry is crucial to the proper workings of justice, governance, and politics.
In many cases, the standards promulgated by standards bodies are
only available electronically on a web site that only works on a
particular browser, or as a PDF file with a plugin that only runs on
certain operating systems. In many cases, the documents are so
restricted in use that they won't work with software used by the
visually impaired, or the searching capabilities are so restricted
that lawyers, paralegals, policy analysts, legislative aides, and government
officials are unable to find the passages they need.
One of the most important reasons the law has no restrictions on use is
so that innovation may flourish in the marketplace, creating better
solutions for citizens, lawyers, government workers, and public safety
professionals. Restrictions on reuse have frozen the format of standards
documents inside dozens of old web sites and outmoded formats maintained
by standards organizations, many of whom run Internet sites that are littered
with technical errors and broken software.
Perhaps the most troubling indefensible thunderbolts are when the
law is kept secret and may not be consulted. In Estonia, one of the
most advanced and democratic societies and generally an exemplar of open
government practices, Eesti Standardikeskuse (EVS) received an order
with payment via PayPal from Public.Resource.Org for €3,208.68
for the purchase of 166 technical standards required under Estonian
law. The next day, the order was cancelled, the money returned, and a
notice dispatched indicating that the service was being refused. When
we inquired as to why, the answer was a curt 1-line response:
“We would keep the circumstances to ourselves and we
recommend to order the standards from another country.”
Even in the case of European Union regulations, which must be
adopted by all European Union nations without change, there is a national foreword. Other standards
are developed specifically for Estonia and are only available from
EVS. Public.Resource.Org wrote to the Honorable Thomas Hendrik Ilves,
the President of Estonia and a leader in open government and asked him
for help. When he didn't answer, we wrote to the President's aide, and
then to the President's son, neither of whom answered. In a society
governed by the Rule of Law, should one have to know the President's
son to be able to purchase the law? In a modern democracy, should the
government be able to pick and choose who shall know the rules?
§ 5. This Law is Your Law
The U.S. Copyright Office, in the
Compendium of Copyright Office
Practices,
states:
“Edicts of government, such as judicial opinions,
administrative rulings, legislative enactments, public ordinances, and
similar official legal documents are not copyrightable for reasons of
public policy.”
In order to promote public education and public safety, equal
justice for all, a better informed citizenry, the rule of law, world
trade and world peace, Public.Resource.Org has undertaken to make
technical edicts of government available on a noncommercial basis, as
it is the right of all humans to know and speak the laws that govern
them.
The focus in this release is on mandatory public safety standards.
In many nations, public safety standards are expressly mandatory. In other
countries, elaborate dances are undertaken to protect an illusion
that the standards are somehow voluntary, but in each of the documents
published there is a compelling public interest and the documents have
been promulgated under the direction of government and play a key role
in society.
A number of the documents released come directly from the standard
bodies, because they make the documents available in draft or in final form. In other
cases, such as China, the documents were submitted to the World Trade
Organization, which maintains a portal with thousands of standards.
These standards are made available to the public as part of the WTO's
mandate to promote world trade by requiring full disclosure of the rules and
standards governing trade with a country.
Many of the documents released were purchased directly from
standards organizations after careful research. Most of the standards
were ordered in paper format. For PDF files, such as those that were obtained from
the World Trade Organization, the documents were fixed by properly
embedding fonts and fixing technical errors.
One of the most important reasons for making standards available
is to allow for transformative uses, proving better access and utility for citizens.
Of the standards being
published, several hundred have so far been rekeyed and reset by Public.Resource.Org
into valid HTML files. Many
of the graphics have been redrawn into the open Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
format so that the graphics can be resized and manipulated. Likewise,
mathematical formulas are being reset into the Math Markup
Language (MML), providing better access for the visually impaired and better
functionality for those wishing to cut and paste formulas.
A number of other transformative uses become possible when the
documents have been rekeyed into valid HTML. Proper metadata is added
to the document headers, making them accessible and discoverable by
search engines. Access protocols such as FTP and rsync allow bulk
access and resynchronization to large collections of standards
documents. Digital signatures allow users to verify that the documents
have not been modified by comparing them to a known good version of
the document.
All over the world, for centuries, nations have embraced the
concept of the Rule of Law—the principle that prescribed law,
rather than the whims and desires of any individual, should govern
society. The Rule of Law is enshrined in ancient texts and in modern
legislation, treaties, and judicial decisions. It is a central
protection against tyranny and against a society where justice is
arbitrary and some gain unfair advantage over others.
Only if the law is truly free and available can we expect people
and enterprises to obey the law, to know their rights under the law,
and to evaluate and participate in the work of improving the law. Only
if the law is accessible to all, can we truly say that a society is
governed by the Rule of Law.
By making technical standards governing building safety,
transportation safety, energy safety, food and water safety, and other
important areas readily available to all without restriction, we make
society better. First responders and government officials can do more
to protect citizens. Small enterprises can more easily and affordable
comply with the law and build new businesses. Students, educators,
scientists, engineers, policy advocates, journalists, and government
workers can more easily read the standards and learn about technology,
commerce, and government. They can work to improve the standards
themselves, and they can improve upon the accessibility and usefulness
of the standards by making searchable databases or better navigational
tools.
Innovation and education will benefit by opening up this world,
but at the root are basic issues of democracy and justice. We cannot
tell citizens to obey laws that are only available for the rich to
read. The current system acts as a poll tax on access to justice, a
deliberate rationing and restriction of information critical to our
public safety and economic progress.
The law must be easily available to all people, access to the
legal system and the texts that make up the law should not be bought,
or sold, or rationed. People must have the right—an unfettered right—to
read the law.
People must also have the right to communicate the provisions
of law to others—to speak the law. When Justice Stephen Breyer said,
“if a law isn't public, it isn't a law,” he was expressing the
long-standing doctrine of the Rule of Law, one that has become
ever more important in our information age.
Nobody can deny you the right to read and know the law. Nobody can
tell you that justice is for sale. Read the law and make it better. Make your society better and
make it safer.
You own your government. The Rule of Law is the rule of the
people.
The law is yours to read, yours to know, and yours to speak. This
law is your law.
Published by
Public.Resource.Org
Last Modified January 7, 2013