The University of Alabama School of Law
The University of Alabama School of Law
As part of the regulatory process, comments can be submitted for proposed rules. Within the Federal Register announcement of the Proposed Rule, there is text stating that Comments must be received on or before a certain date. This is known as the Notice and Comment Period.
The comments included in Regulatory Insight are the comments that have been submitted as a part of this process and are posted on Regulations.gov. The comments are searchable individually or can be reviewed by Docket or RIN series.
There are 3 ways to access the Comments submitted for proposed rules in Regulatory Insight.
1. You can access comments through the Comments search form where you can search by All Fields, Agency, Country, Organization, and Submitter.
Note: that full text is not an option
In addition, you can search for comments filed by Docket Number, RIN number, or Comment ID number.
Search results using All Fields, Agency, Country, Organization, Submitter or Comment ID Number will bring up individual comments.
Using the Document Number or RIN research returns results for all individual comments as well as the Comments Archive (an archive of all comments for that RIN or docket number).
2. Another way to access the comments is from within a regulatory history. If a RIN series or has any associated comments, you will see a link to the Comments Archive.
3. The final way to access comments is from the Federal Register article. Both Proposed Rules and Final Rules with comments will have links to the Comment Archive.
(Remember the caveat: Regulatory Insight includes: comments posted from January 1, 2017 onward pertaining to Federal Register articles (e.g. notices, proposed rules and rules); retrospective comments relating to Dockets which were open for comment in 2016 and appear in our Regulatory Histories).
The top of the Comments Archive shows the filter where you can search the metadata (note the comments are not searchable), filter by date or whether or not there are attachments.
The Summary section of the page gives you the RIN and Dockets, the title of the Proposed Rule, a link back to the Regulatory History and the public law text, and the URL for the Comments Archive you are viewing.
The first item listed in the Comments section is the Proposed Rule so you can easily download it to consult when reading comments.
You can sort the comments by ID number or by date (oldest/newest first).
After the Federal Register Proposed Rule the comments will appear. Note that the information provided here is based on what was filed when the comment was submitted.
Click the Publication Details or other materials as appropriate to view the comment.