New - 17th July -
If you have followed the QR code on the first slide of our presentation at Singapore CALC Conference 2026, please see the pdf version of the slides Updating what we tell ourselves about the legislative sentence for the AI age.
General -
One of the outputs of our project is non-technological guidance for legislative drafters in Jersey’s Legislative Drafting Office and other drafting offices in the Commonwealth. We are working on expanding the material in the guidance, with a presentation at CALC 2026 in Singapore, probably submitting an article to the Loophole after the conference, and possibly publishing a book at some point later.
- The material is the result of the lessons the project has learnt that apply to drafting regardless of whether the resulting legislation is made computer-readable.
- The material is about the long-term non-tech lessons learned from logic & computing as part of the project - which will be longer-lasting than any information about tech, especially AI, which would be out of date very quickly.
- Jersey’s drafting is based on the Commonwealth drafting style, so the guidance can take the form of a general Commonwealth version with Jersey-specific notes.
- See our wiki and other materials on our OSF site.
As legislative drafters, regardless of what tech we do/don’t use, we can sharpen the rigour of our drafting by learning from modern logicians & programmers
- We need to update Coode on the structure of legislative sentences
- We also need to continue the ongoing drive for more conscious & systematic approaches to drafting
Commonwealth legislative drafters should follow up on what came out of the switch from “shall” to “must”, which made us more conscious & careful about “must” v “is”
- are we careful enough about “may” – used as a permission, a power, or a factual “might”?
See also Duncan Berry “Is it sufficient for legislative counsel merely to state the rules” Loophole, Apr 2012
- are we careful enough about “else” – when “if” conditions are not met, do our readers know what we intend the result to be?
We are incorporating this into our training course for our trainee legislative drafters, based on Commonwealth of Learning, as used by Athabasca & South Pacific universities
- we are looking at developing training materials & a section for a drafting manual
- see our experiment, produced using AI (& still very much a work in progress), in making an online guided self-teaching module on the guidance.
Download these materials and see Chapter 5 of our report on our work to the end of 2025.
This page is being updated. You can find a full archive on OSF: https://osf.io/yzf6x/.