Re: [legalcitem] Looking for feedback on types of administrative documents

[Fabio Vitali <fabio@cs.unibo.it>]

Dear Chet, 

my 0.05€ [1], right off the top of my head, and as a non-jurist. 

In Akoma Ntoso an extremely important distinction is in the effectivity of the document. Thus a proposed regulation is nowhere close to a final regulation, in that one is potential, and the other is active. 

Consider a legislative act: it starts with no status whatsoever as a draft by one or more MPs. In this stage it is nothing. Then it is submitted to the appropriate office of their chamber, where it is formally received and examined, and if accepted it is turned into a bill, and scheduled for discussion according to procedure. Once the full procedure is carried out, it is turned into an approved bill which then becomes an act (i.e., law) only once it is enacted, e.g. by the signature of the President. 

First draft, bill and act are very similar, may even have identical text, but are completely different types of document with completely different impact on reality. 

So the first distinction I would make is between enacted and non-enacted documents (including not-yet-enacted ones). Also the sentence "regulations that have been finally published in some codified form and have taken effect" sounds odd to me: enactment is a formal step, which may include or be synchronized with (a special form of) publication, but the determination of its nature is given by the enactment, not the mere publication. 

A second lesson we learnt from examining documents from all over the world is that the best way to represent documents is by using the name that the local tradition has used to call them. Thus, if, for instance, directives are really a special case of orders, but they are traditionally called differently, then they should be called differently in the citation and in the reference: local tradition rules in naming document. This means that if the Executive, 20 years in the future, will start naming orders as wishes, then by all means these will be referred to as wishes, even if they are conceptually and legally equivalent to orders as emanated today.  

Ciao

Fabio

--

[1] About 0.08$

Il giorno 12/mag/2014, alle ore 22:52, Chet Ensign <chet.ensign@oasis-open.org> ha scritto:

> Members of the Legal Citations TC, 
> 
> 
> 
> This request is specifically to those of you who are familiar with legal jurisdictions and practices other than the U.S. 
> 
> 
> 
> The Executive/Administrative subcommittee has pulled together a list of typical document types that might be cited and that we should characterize. I have put an informal description with each. 
> 
> 
> 
> If you know of other types of content that could fall under the executive / regulatory / administrative banner and that isn’t on this list, would you please send me a note. If you have some examples to point to, that would help enormously as well. 
> 
> 
> 
> Note that we have left court-type proceedings handled by regulatory agencies off our list, assuming that these ought to fall under the court subcommittee. 
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance for any feedback you have for us. 
> 
> 
> 
> Content types: 
> 
> 
> 
> 	• Prescriptive (that is, having some force of law): 
> 		• Proposed regulations (i.e. regulations first posted in some official publication for comment and review.) 
> 		• Final regulations (i.e. regulations that have been finally published in some codified form and have taken effect.) 
> 		• Orders (i.e. directives coming from an executive or administrative that impose some obligations on the recipients)
> 		• Directives (i.e. more general instructions to a broad, possibly more fuzzy, set of constitutients. Orders may cover both? )
> 	• Non-prescriptive (important but not something one would / could enforce):
> 		• Official notices 
> 		• Minutes / transcripts (e.g. of committee hearings)
> 		• Reports / findings (i.e. reports commissioned by a legislature as part of the process of developing legislation) 
> 		• Proclamations
> 		• Presidential memoranda (i.e. general informative documents) 
> 		• Signing statements (i.e. unique to the U.S.? A written pronouncement by the U.S. president on signing legislation generally giving notice on how the administration intends to interpret or enforce the law it has signed) 
> 		• Letters & interpretations (i.e. letters from a regulatory agency providing specific guidance to a party affected by its rules)
> 		• Budgets
> 		• Patents and trademarks
> 		• Required filings (generally by parties outside the government such as corporate financial filings)
> 
> -- 
> 
> /chet 
> ----------------
> Chet Ensign
> Director of Standards Development and TC Administration 
> OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
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--

Fabio Vitali                            Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science        Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY               Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
phone:  +39 051 2094872              Man got to tell himself he understand.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it         Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/