Page:International Code Council v. UpCodes (2020).pdf/39

 of Suffolk County’s maps are purely dictated by law, it is likely that Suffolk County needed no additional incentive to create them.” See id. at 194. The court also observed “[d]ue process requires that before a criminal sanction or significant civil or administrative penalty attaches, an individual must have fair warning of the conduct prohibited by the statute or the regulation that makes such a sanction possible.” Id. at 195. The Circuit Court held that due process required only access to the statute establishing the obligation to pay property taxes, because “the tax maps themselves do not create the legal obligation … but are merely a means by which the government assesses a pre-existing obligation.” Id.

Though acknowledging that due process concerns must be balanced against economic incentives in some circumstances, this Court is not persuaded that the need for economic incentives could meaningfully weigh against the need for free public access to the law in these circumstances. See infra  Although neither BOCA nor Veeck specifically set forth the balancing test proposed by Suffolk, both courts effectively weighed due process concerns against the incentive arguments pressed by ICC’s predecessors. Even though the BOCA court remanded to