Someone wants to replace a roof, run a street party, or get a neighbour to stop drilling at six in the morning. Every rule governing all three is public, free, and online. Getting from the question to a defensible answer still takes an afternoon, and most people give up before they get there.
The gap is not secrecy. It is not even legal language, which is difficult but at least tractable. The gap is that a rule arrives as a document, and a document on its own cannot tell you the three things you need: whether it is complete, whether it is current, and whether it is the one that governs your situation.
Availability was the easy half
Fifteen years of open government work solved the distribution problem. Registers went online. Enactments got scanned. Departments posted their chapters. Almost everywhere, the text that binds a resident can be retrieved by that resident without asking permission or paying anyone.
What did not get built is the layer underneath, the one that connects documents to each other and to the ground. Institutions publish for compliance. Compliance is satisfied by the document existing at a stable URL. Nothing in that obligation requires the publisher to say which instrument this one amends, which version it replaced, which department also regulates the same activity, or which territory it actually covers.
So the public gets a pile. A large, honest, well-intentioned pile, in which the individual pieces are authoritative and the relationships between them have been left as an exercise for the reader.
An amendment without its original says nothing
Open a typical municipal amendment. It will tell you that in section 4, subsection (b), the words "ten metres" are deleted and replaced with "fifteen metres". That is the entire content. The document is genuine, current, and useless in isolation.
To use it you need the instrument it modifies, which may not be linked, may sit in a different collection, and may itself have been amended six times by other documents you have not found. Consolidated versions exist for some jurisdictions and some chapters, produced on a schedule nobody publishes, with no guarantee that the consolidation postdates the amendment you are holding.
This is the most common failure a person hits, and it is invisible. Nothing about the amendment announces that it is a fragment. It looks like law because it is law. A reader with no training assumes they have found the rule, reads the replacement number, and walks away with a figure that means nothing without the sentence it was inserted into.
The upload date is not the rule's date
A file posted last month may describe a rule from 2009 that was superseded in 2014. A file posted in 2011 may still be the operative instrument today. The date the reader can see is the date the document appeared on a server, which correlates with nothing.
Real currency requires a different fact: whether this instrument is in force, and if so, in what version. Most publishing systems do not carry that fact, because the institution already knows the answer internally and never needed to write it down for outsiders. The absence is not deception. It is just an omission that transfers the entire burden of verification onto whoever is least equipped to carry it.
A search engine makes this worse by ranking on freshness signals that have nothing to do with legal status. The most recently crawled page wins. Sometimes that page is a departmental summary of a rule that changed two years after the summary was written.
Two authorities do not collapse into the stricter one
The instinct when a person discovers that two bodies regulate the same activity is to obey whichever looks harsher and consider the matter closed. It is a reasonable instinct and it does not work.
Obligations from separate authorities are separate obligations. A stricter time limit under one instrument does not discharge a permit requirement under the other. An exemption granted by one body is not an exemption from the second body's rule, because the second body never granted anything. Following the stricter of two documents can leave a person fully compliant with one regime and in breach of another they satisfied only by coincidence.
The correct shape of the answer is a conditional with multiple branches that all remain live: this applies here, that applies too, this exception survives under one and not the other, this notification is required regardless. That is harder to read than a single sentence, and it is what the situation actually is. Flattening it is not simplification. It is a guess, presented as a conclusion.
The missing layer is relationships, not vocabulary
Most attempts to make law accessible focus on rewriting it. Plain-language summaries, explainers, FAQ pages. These help, and they treat the wrong bottleneck.
A person stuck on construction noise hours is not usually stuck on the words. They are stuck on which of the four documents in front of them is operative, whether the one from the parks department also applies to their street, and whether the 2018 amendment they found has already been folded into the consolidated chapter they are reading. Rewriting any one of those documents in friendlier prose does not touch the problem. The difficulty lives between documents, not inside them.
What would touch it is unglamorous and structural.
Lineage. Which instrument does this one amend, replace, or consolidate, and what came before it. Preserved history rather than silent overwriting, so that a superseded version remains readable and clearly labelled as superseded.
Status and date. In force, repealed, or unknown, and as of when. Stated explicitly, per document, including when the honest value is unknown.
Extent. Which authority issued this and over what territory or subject. Not a decorative shape on a map, but an actual statement of what the publisher is and is not claiming.
Neighbours. Which other bodies regulate the same activity in the same place. A person cannot discover an obligation whose existence nobody mentioned.
None of that is a legal innovation. It is metadata that the issuing bodies already hold and have never been asked to expose in a form that survives contact with the public.
Uncertainty is a feature of the answer
There is a strong temptation, in any system that presents public rules, to resolve everything. Uncertainty looks like failure. A caveat looks like weakness. A clean answer looks like competence.
But the uncertainty is real and it belongs to the reader, because the reader is the one who will act. "This document has no known enactment date." "This is an extract covering one subject; other chapters may apply." "No parcel-level boundary was available, so this reflects the municipality rather than the plot." Each of those sentences is more useful than a confident paragraph, because each one tells a person exactly where their next phone call goes.
Removing those statements does not remove the underlying doubt. It relocates it, out of the interface and into the reader's decision, where they can no longer see it.
Maintaining the connections is public work
The relationships decay. Departments reorganise, URLs move, consolidations lag, a chapter is renumbered and every external reference silently breaks. A corpus assembled once and left alone becomes wrong at a rate nobody measures, and it becomes wrong quietly, which is the problem.
That makes this a maintenance obligation rather than a project. Publishing a document is a discrete act that ends. Keeping a set of documents connected, dated, and honest about its own gaps is continuous, and it is closer to the actual public duty than the upload was. Nobody is currently assigned to it. Cities assume the register discharges it. Search engines were never in that business. The people who feel the absence are residents, who have no standing to fix it and usually no idea the layer was supposed to exist.
Accessibility has been measured, for a long time now, by whether a document can be retrieved. That is the wrong meter. The useful question is whether a person who retrieves it can establish what it means for their situation and see clearly where their own knowledge stops.
By that standard, most public law is published and almost none of it is available.