3rd Issue of International Journal of Legislative and Law Reform

Abstract

This issue of the journal addresses the contentious issue of setting and
maintaining standards for legislative drafting and law reform projects.
In the first instance, this is referred to as a "contentious" issue considering that
both academic scholars and practitioners in the field of legislative drafting are not
agreed on what constitutes uniform and universal "standards" for undertaking legislative
drafting and law reform projects that apply regardless of differences in the context of
national, regional, cross-country, subject-matter eccentricities.
To begin with, it is necessary to provide a definition of the word "standards". Both
in the English language and it legal parlance, the word "standards" carries the idea of a
"model, a criterion that is used to measure quality of things in this instance legislation.
According to ordinary English Language usage, in the Oxford Compact Dictionary
(2003) the word "standard" is defined as "a level of quality or attainment; something
used as a measure, or model in comparative evaluations". This definition is similar to
the definition from a strictly legal point of view, according to the Black’s Law Dictionary,
10th Edn. (2009) a "standard" is "a model accepted as correct by custom, consent or
authority and a criterion for measuring acceptability, quality, or accuracy."