Key parts of US laws are hard for the public to find and read
It happens in court cases from time to time: Lawyers and judges discussing the meaning of a law can’t access the text they need to review.
It happened in a federal court in Rhode Island in 2004 and in the Indiana Supreme Court in 2017.
In both situations, state legislators and regulators had adopted laws and rules that required, under penalty of law, companies to do specific things to keep the public safe. The Rhode Island case was about fire protection, and the Indiana dispute was about high-tension electrical power lines. But the state officials had not spelled out the specific rules.
Instead, they required adherence to safety rules that were created and maintained by private companies – the National Fire Protection Association and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, respectively. The legislators and regulators did not, however, include the text of these safety rules in the laws and rules they adopted.