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Rule & Criteria Register

A public register of rules and criteria — instantiates Transparency for Accountability

Publishes the current rules, standards, and criteria a body decides by, with version history, so decisions can be checked against a rulebook that isn't secret.

A Rule & Criteria Register publishes the standards a body actually decides by — the rules, thresholds, criteria, and scoring guides — and keeps their version history, so anyone can check a decision against the yardstick that was in force when it was made. Its distinguishing contribution is disclosing the decision rule itself, prospectively and durably, as opposed to any single decision, its reasons, or its evidence. It attacks "secret law": the situation where the criteria that determine outcomes are known only to the deciders, so decisions can't be predicted, checked, or contested against any stated standard.

Example

A city health department posts the exact scoring rubric behind its restaurant letter grades — which violations carry how many points, the point ranges for an A/B/C, how a re-inspection adjusts a score — with the effective date of each version. An owner who gets a B can see precisely which point total produced it and which rule version applied, and can contest a specific point assignment against the published criteria rather than against an inspector's discretion. When the rubric changes, the register shows the old and new versions and when each was in force, so a grade can't be justified by a rule that didn't yet exist. The principle that the standards must be promulgated to bind at all is an old one.[1]

How it works

The distinguishing discipline is that the criteria are published ahead of the decisions they govern and versioned so the applicable rule at any date is recoverable. It holds the master catalogue — every rule and criterion in a canonical, dated form — which the per-decision mechanisms then cite. No criterion is applied that isn't in the register, and no criterion changes without a new dated version.

Tuning parameters

  • Specificity of criteria — exact thresholds vs. general principles. Precise criteria are checkable but can be gamed to the letter; principles are flexible but harder to hold anyone to.
  • Versioning rigor — effective dates and full change history, or just "current." Full history lets past decisions be checked, at a maintenance cost.
  • Coverage — which decisions have published criteria at all. Broad coverage closes discretion gaps; some judgments genuinely resist codification.
  • Change-process visibility — whether criteria changes are announced and explained. Visible changes prevent quiet goalpost-moving.
  • Bindingness — whether the published criteria are the only permitted grounds. Strict bindingness kills secret side-rules but reduces room for exceptional cases.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is that published, versioned criteria make decisions predictable and checkable, and let a challenge point to the rule rather than argue about discretion; they also expose retroactive rule-changes for what they are.

Its failure mode is that a register can disclose the rulebook while the real decisions run on unwritten criteria — a published standard that is not the one actually used is transparency theater, and arguably worse than none because it looks accountable. Precise criteria also invite gaming to the letter while missing the intent. The discipline is bindingness — decisions must cite a registered criterion, enforced through the reason-giving template — plus periodic checks that the register matches what deciders actually do.

How it implements the components

  • rule_and_criteria_disclosure — the mechanism's substance: the published, canonical catalogue of the rules and criteria in force.
  • provenance_and_version_link — every criterion carries effective dates and version history, so the rule applicable to any past decision is recoverable and retroactive edits are visible.

It does not apply a criterion to a particular case (the Reason-Giving Template does that, citing this register), map who is empowered to set or apply the rules (Authority & Delegation Register), or index the resulting decisions (the Public Decision Log).

References

[1] Lon Fuller, in The Morality of Law, listed promulgation — that laws must be made public — among the basic conditions without which a system of rules fails to bind at all. A criteria register is the administrative echo: standards that decide people's outcomes have to be published to be legitimate. ↩