Abstract
Legislative drafting is the process whereby the conceptualisation of a new legislation is transformed into an actual legislative text. This process can be broken down into several, potentially repeated stages (planning, composing, revising, editing) and involves a range of actors with different skills (policy makers and domain experts, drafting specialists and language experts, translators). We argue that the way in which the drafting process is organised can have a substantial impact on the quality of the product. For this reason, we first discuss the requirements that each stage of the drafting process must meet in order to facilitate the production of high-quality legislative texts. We then introduce the major models by which the drafting process has been organised — in civil law and common law countries as well as in multilingual jurisdictions — and we identify their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Höfler, Stefan