How can citizens obey laws they have no way of reading?
(Come to think of it, at no point has anyone explained all the laws to me, either. Are we all supposed to peruse law books in our spare time to make sure we're not breaking the law?)
The problem is this: in a free copy world once someone pays for this work everyone else is free to copy it. So if Chicago pays for it, New York City is free to just copy Chicago's law and save all the money of paying someone to do this themselves. This is obviously unfair to Chicago who put a lot of money into it. (Chicago and New York might agree to share the costs, but there are a lot of small towns that will not)
What code publishers want to do is privately put the money in to write a good code, get the cities to make it law, and then charge for copies. This business model works, and is fair: you buy the code if you want it (and $75 for the book it isn't that unreasonable a price to pay either if you need it). The city gets a copy in their library so if you don't want your own copy just read when city offices are open. It isn't a bad deal.
(do not read the above as my approval of it, I'm just stating the argument)
The ABA is lobbying to for the government to mandate at least public read access to what are now, private, for-pay standards incorporated into laws and regulations.
The argument for this is you shouldn't have to pay to read the law (there is certainly an argument [which I agree with] -- as in the source article -- that this isn't enough access, and that ideally we should have more. But that's an argument that the ABA position doesn't go far enough to correct the problem in the status quo, rather than an argument that it is in the wrong direction.)
> How can citizens obey laws they have no way of reading?
That's exactly the problem that the ABA proposal addresses -- in the status quo, there are rules you have no way of reading. With the ABA proposal, that would no longer be the case.
As for the rest of the laws, at least in the US, following common sense will keep you out of trouble most of the time. Judges by and large do not decide cases by mechanically interpreting laws, but rather by choosing which laws make most sense to apply in the given context. It is even sometimes possible to outright break laws, as in famous cases like State v Shack.
Pragmatic me says legislators were more than happy to essentially rubber-stamp, "We'll defer to a higher power because this stuff is super complicated and really esoteric stuff" and the higher power said it wanted a paycheck.