NEW DELHI: The judicial process is all about precedent. Judges decide cases on the basis of past occurrances, the lawyers cite them to argue their cases better; and legal drafters use it to make a new law sound more profound, archaic and difficult to understand.
The Union Ministry of Law and Justice has decided that it is now time to change the way law is written. Aiming to make legislations easily understood, the Ministry proposes that future laws should be written in simple language to make them user friendly and unambiguous to the general public.
The new directive also seeks to raise the level of drafting skills available in the country by starting new courses for the legal officers so that the laws drafted in India would have fewer lacunae compared to legislations made in other countries.
The Ministry’s initiative is backed by a study done by Vidhi Centre
for Legal Policy, which in its report stated, “Indian laws continue to be drafted in an archaic fashion.
Combining multiple legislative ideas in one single clause, reliance on redundant tools such as provisos and notwithstanding clauses, use of archaic, vague and foreign words and the employment of gendered language are some such practices. Poor, complex drafting renders a law inaccessible to the common person. The need of the hour, thus, is to simplify legislative drafting.”
The study also makes suggestions on how the laws should be drafted: such as, the first part should have guidelines dealing with the structure of a law (order of chapters and clauses, structural elements of preliminary clauses, definitions, etc.), while the second part should list out language guidelines (use of foreign words, grammar and sentence construction, etc.).
The ministry is also refreshing the courses available for drafting of laws so that young students can take a three-month basic course and help state governments and administrations in preparing laws.
Appreciation courses of two weeks duration for the middle level officers and voluntary internship programme for law students have also been suggested so that students pursuing legal education get ample opportunity to understand the drafting of laws and there is in-house training available
for the benefit of Law Department officials.