The Law Library of Congress, which maintains the world’s largest collection of legal materials, produces a monthly publication called World Law Bulletin that features the highlights of legal developments around the world, as well as occasional essays on specialized topics by some of the Library’s resident experts.
For no good reason, however, the World Law Bulletin is not released to the public. Until such time as Congress authorizes it to do so, the Library cannot make it directly available. Efforts are underway to instigate a change in disclosure policy to permit public release, but that has not happened yet.
In the meantime, Secrecy News has obtained the latest issues from December 2005 through March 2006.
Scanning the March issue (pdf) at random, one learns that “The Government of Botswana has amended the Liquor Act so that as of April 1, 2006, beer may only be sold for five hours a day.”
But a Library analyst astutely observes that “Bars and bottle shops are to open at 5 p.m. and close at 11 p.m. (which would appear to be a six-hour period for legal sales).”
See the latest issues of World Law Bulletin here.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.