Commonwealth Legislative Drafting Manual
Synopsis
In 1976, recognising that there was a shortage of trained legislative drafters in the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth Secretariat first published a legislative drafting manual aimed at informing those practitioners with little or no previous experience in the skill, and assisting those with some experience who had never considered why drafting needed to be undertaken in a particular way.
That aim remains, but more than 40 years later there have been important changes in the way legislation is drafted. These mainly concern the perceived need to make it more accessible to those to be affected by it, in particular by the use of plain language and sentence structures that relate more closely to those used in formal non-legislative documents.
In the light of these and other changes, the Commonwealth Legislative Drafting Manual has been completely rewritten, and it now guides the practitioner step by step through the various things he or she needs to know. It also contains a series of appendices relating to the procedure for the preparation of legislation, the contents of drafting instructions, and some hints to the beginner on the best approaches to the task.
Chapters
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Foreword
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Preface
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Acknowledgements
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What is Legislation and why is it Drafted the Way it is?
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The Role of Legislative Counsel
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Background Legislation
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The Basic Elements of a Legislative Sentence
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Modern Commonwealth Conventions in Legislative Drafting
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Plain Language Drafting
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Structuring Legislative Drafts
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Punctuation (and Capitalisation)
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Definitions and Interpretation Provisions
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Words to use with Special Care (and Other Drafting Problems)
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The Legislative Scheme: Principles Governing the Type of Legislation Required and the Ordering of Its Provisions
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Introductory and Preliminary Provisions
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Final Provisions
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Penal Provisions
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Delegated Powers to Make Legislation
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Amending Legislation
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Specific Types of Application
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Statutory Corporations
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Licensing Legislation
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Financial Legislation
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Legislative Procedure and Preparation
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Guidelines for the Preparation of Cabinet Submissions
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Drafting Instructions
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Suggested Approaches to Translation of Policy
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Suggested Approaches to Drafting
Published
Categories
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
