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Guidance & training for drafters

One of the outputs of our project will be guidance and training material written up for drafters in Jersey’s Legislative Drafting Office.

  • The material will be the result of the lessons the project is learning that apply to drafting regardless of whether the resulting legislation is made computer-readable.
  • The material will be 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as part of the project - which will be longer-lasting than any information about tech, especially AI which would be out of date very quickly.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 should in principle be easily adaptable to produce a general Commonwealth version alongside the Jersey-specific version.
  • See our plan on our OSF site, and other materials there

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

We 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 will develop training materials & a section for a drafting manual
  • ideally for all Commonwealth drafting offices as well as for Jersey LDO

Look out for these materials and our final report at the end of 2024

Jersey's first trainee legislative drafters - born digital Draft of non-tech training materials Draft of non-tech guidance

This page is being updated. You can find a full archive on OSF: https://osf.io/yzf6x/.