That's not always the way it works, though. The following is a bit off-topic, and mirrors something I've said before in some older discussion that I don't care to find at the moment. :P
I work for a semi-large (>$1B annual sales) specialty chemical and polymer company. We have a dedicated group of people whose jobs revolve specifically around maintaining compliance with the various standards from OSHA, EPA, FDA, etc. They keep us meeting our customers' needs and expectations, in addition to keeping us safe, clean, and in compliance with all the appropriate laws and regulations.
In our specific industry, there are a small handful of global companies of similar size, and tons of smaller, regional companies (usually privately owned) who are two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the big boys. These companies don't have teams of people devoted to regulatory compliance - often, they don't even have one dedicated person. Likewise, our customers come in all kinds of sizes. Paralleling our industry, each specific market usually has a few big boys and countless smaller players.
With these small companies - on both sides of supply - there's a significant amount of (sometimes willful) ignorance of the law. Neither the supplier or the customer may be aware, for example, that they're not supposed to be using various chlorinated solvents to improve the performance of the material, which enables them to use cheaper, lower-performance polymers to make, say, packaging coatings or adhesives. We know that we're not allowed to do such things, and that puts us at a cost disadvantage. If we were to do what they do, we'd get slapped down hard because not only are we a big, juicy-looking target for the fairly-rare regulatory review, but since we knew better it becomes a willful violation, which usually bumps the fines up by a factor of ten or more.
The little fish can plead ignorance, if they even get reviewed, which in my anecdotal experience I've not ever seen happen.
On the topic at hand, I believe laws should be publicly available for review. I just wanted to comment on how regulatory structures don't always serve to keep the little guy out - often, they're simply more binding on the big guys.