Application of ICT in Legislative Drafting and Law Reform Projects

Abstract

This issue of the International Journal of Legislative Drafting and Law Reform contains two papers dealing specifically with the topic of colonial and post-colonial law albeit from different jurisdictions, Bangladesh and Malta.
The paper authored by Arpeeta Shams Mizan discusses the colonial legacy in legislative drafting in Bangladesh. Its main thrust is that the law has to connect to the popular sentiment and, unless and until, this is so, it will have little effect. Thus a law within one given legal system, good as it might be for the purpose of that system, is not automatically and necessarily exportable to another legal system which has it own diverse rules, legal culture and social realities. Laws cannot, without a symbiotic change, be transplanted successfully from one legal system to the other.
Kevin Aquilina, writing on Maltese Law, accentuates further the difficulties encountered by drafters, legislators and judges when drafting, making and interpreting law within a mixed legal system which draws upon a plurality of legal systems, all with their own rules which, at times, are contrasting and contradictory, if not also conflicting. The solution advocated is for post-colonial law to be based upon an indepth study of the characteristic features of the plural legal systems that compose it.
Two other papers focus specifically on Nigerian electoral law, intertwining a drafting and interpretation perspective with law reform.