Welcome

Welcome to the International Forum of Legislative Drafting

The aim of this forum is to provide a space for legislative drafters around the world to share information, ideas, problems and solutions.

There is no requirement for membership, and anyone can post or comment at any time; at least to begin with, there will be no formal moderation, but the editors reserve the right to alter or remove posts. Also to begin with, anonymous posts will be removed. Click on the comment link at the foot of a post to add your thoughts to the discussion.

So start a thread on any topic you like, and see if you can rouse other people's interest!

Tuesday 21 September 2010

Cautionary Tales for Drafters

Have you made or found a drafting error (as opposed to a policy error!) that you want to tell people about, perhaps so other people can avoid falling into the same trap?

Has a provision of yours that you thought was foolproof been misconstrued by a court?

Or have you had any other experiences that could be a useful warning to others? Please share them here.

5 comments:

  1. As a sub-thought to this thread, should drafters be more open about our mistakes? Here's a radical idea to think about: when Ministers make mistakes they now have a formal place in Hansard to acknowledge them; and minor typographical mistakes are correctable by correction slip; but when we make a substantive drafting mistake, there is nothing formal to day except to sit quiet and either (a) hope the courts will spot it and correct it under the Inco rule, or (b) hope the courts won't spot it. Think how different the process and argument of the Humber Bridge case could have been (although not the result) if the Government had simply filed some formal acknowledgment that they had got it wrong? Lots of pros and cons - but perhaps some food for thought?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I won't confess to any major mistakes, but I do wish that I had cut down my word-length for many statutes I have previously drafted. I think many drafters are, to quote Churchill, intoxicated by the exuberance of their own verbosity. We think we are really smart and want to show everyone how smart we are by drafting a really complicated provision. (Or maybe this is just me).
    If you look at lexisnexis, they have a "formal" procedure for correcting drafting errors. For example, they have a comment on s.90 of the Criminal Justice (NI) Order 2008 which states:
    "The wording of sub-s (4) above has been reproduced in accordance with the Queen's Printers' Copy. It has been confirmed with the relevant Northern Ireland Office department that the reference to sub-s (6) is a drafting error which should actually read “(5)(a)”. The amendment has been taken in accordingly."
    If you do a search for "drafting error" in lexisnexis, you will find many more.
    I have a vague recollection of seeing a long title once making reference to it correcting a drafting error in a Northern Ireland statute.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Father's Day was built up in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd, who was considered in Arkansas. Its first celebration was in the Spokane YMCA on June 19, 1910. HappyFathersDay Her father, the Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, was a lone parent who raised his six children there.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father

    ReplyDelete