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Congressional staff serve as the "invisible force" in Congress by helping draft legislation and conduct oversight. Given this, excessive turnover among staff is a loss of institutional memory and inhibits legislators' ability to effectively conduct their constitutional duties. Using a mixed methods research design of interviews and a new survey of staff in the 115th session of Congress, I capture staffer intent to leave their current position and track whether they actually left their position 12 months later. Similar to civil servants, staff who report dissatisfaction with coworkers report higher levels of turnover intention, while the type of office, age, and level of education impact actual turnover. However, the extent to which polarization impacts staffers' job satisfaction impacts both intention and actual exit. My study makes a unique contributions to the growing body of literature devoted to understanding congressional staff by providing important insights into how to recruit and retain staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Susanna Marinelli 1, Francesca Negro 2, Maria Cristina Varone 2, Lina De Paola 2, Gabriele Napoletano 2, Alessandra Lopez 3, Simona Zaami 2*, Giuseppe Basile 4. • The article aims to shed a light on the unique complexities inherent in surrogacy and the legal-ethical challenges that currently exists even in many advanced democracies, which frequently result in uneven and ill-defined standards and processes. • The recent proposal of making surrogacy a "universal crime" has prompted us to better analyze the topic and its ethical and legal implications. • Legislative harmonization at the international level is essential to prevent the cross-border surrogacy trend. The "universal crime" draft bills appear to be difficult to enforce and too vague to be credible at the moment. The article aims to shed a light on the unique complexities inherent in surrogacy and the legal-ethical challenges that currently exists even in many advanced democracies, which frequently result in uneven and ill-defined standards and processes. The recent proposal of making surrogacy a "universal crime", meant to prevent cross-border surrogacy, i.e. travels by citizens from countries where it is illegal to countries where it is legal, has also been weighed, by exploring the current legislative state of affairs, trends and future horizons. Recent case-law has been analyzed and interpreted, with a close focus on Italian Supreme Court ruling n. 38162, issued on 30th December 2022 and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings issued over the past decade. Uncertainty and ill-defined norms and court rulings risk harming the rights of children, surrogate mothers and intended parents. So far, court decisions have somehow filled the legal vacuum, considering that cross-border surrogacy is not specifically regulated in many countries and the status of children born abroad is still controversial. The views and judgments of supranational courts on the issue need to be accounted for when drafting new specific legislation. It is of utmost importance to uphold the rights of children born through surrogacy abroad, whose best interests risk being damaged. Legislative harmonization at the international level is essential to prevent the cross-border surrogacy trend. The "universal crime" draft bills appear to be difficult to enforce and too vague to be credible at the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key concept in American legislative politics is the extent to which members are effective, that is, have the ability to propose and advance bills on important topics in Congress. We propose a new measure of a member's legislative effectiveness that covers both chambers from 1873 to 2010 and incorporates all 1.1 million introduced bills, opening up a wide range of new opportunities for examining legislative institutions and behavior across this long historical period. To pursue this, we theorize and empirically examine how the determinants of a member's legislative effectiveness hinge on legislative institutions. While uncovering consistent results with the existing literature that has focused on the period starting in the early 1970s, we find striking differences when examining earlier periods. For instance, we find that ideological moderates have higher effectiveness relative to extremists before 1975, whereas the importance of majority party membership increases dramatically from 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study will present the legal basis of the institution of branch inheritance and its primary problems in the application (judicial) practice of Hungarian dualism and I. Czechoslovak Republic. It will also look at the de lege ferenda proposals - Teleszky's 1882 draft law of inheritance, reworked into the government's 1887 draft law of inheritance, the 1900 draft of the 1st Hungarian General Civil Code, and the government's 1933 to 1937 draft laws on branch succession. The draft Czechoslovak legislation was intended only as a temporary solution to the special (sui generis) legal inheritance of inherited property for the inheritance law in force in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus. The then Hungarian and Czechoslovak legal scholarship and practice, when repeatedly considering branch inheritance, was based on its acceptable preservation and therefore until the adoption of the first socialist Civil Code (1950) branch inheritance remained a part of the bourgeois inheritance law in Slovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the possible benefits and substantial risks of 'Rules as Code', the parallel drafting of legislation and codification in software, which has been the subject of attention from policy-makers and pilot studies in some jurisdictions. It highlights the long history of these approaches, and the challenges of ossification, mis-translation of rules, and separation of powers problems. It also examines in the detail the Australian Pintarich case, which demonstrates the inadequacy of conventional judicial review of automated decision-making. It outlines some possible solutions to these issues — two 'internal' to development processes (greater transparency, and literate pair programming) and two 'external' (expanding the capacity of judicial review to look beyond a specific citizen/state interaction and consider the design and development of the controlling software system, and greater cross-disciplinary awareness by lawyers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territorial classifications are routinely used in public policy. In Scotland, the primary classification used to delimit what, where and who is 'rural' is the Scottish Government's Urban Rural Classification, introduced in 2003. However, in the recent past, there appears to have been a reframing of 'rural definitions' in the Scottish policy context. We highlight some of the challenges associated with developing a more nuanced framing of 'rural', drawing upon an analysis of responses to the statutory consultations associated with three recent items of draft legislation: namely, the 2015 consultation on provisions for a future Islands Bill, the 2019 consultation on a proposal for a Remote Rural Communities Bill, and the 2020–2021 consultation to support the preparation of the Fourth National Planning Framework. Implications of these new framings for rural policy, planning and development are discussed. Our conclusion is that, while no territorial classification system is perfect, extending the use of existing tools may offer both robust policy support as well as meaningful insights that differentiate types of 'rural' in a way that is a better fit for current purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing use of automated decision-making (ADM) systems in the public sector and the need to control these has raised many legal questions in academic research and in policymaking. One of the timely means of legal control is accountability, which traditionally includes the ability to impose sanctions on the violator as one dimension. Even though many risks regarding the use of ADM have been noted and there is a common will to promote the safety of these systems, the relevance of the safety research has been discussed little in this context. In this article, I evaluate regulating accountability over the use of ADM in the public sector in relation to the findings of safety research. I conducted the study by focusing on ongoing regulatory projects regarding ADM, the Finnish ADM legislation draft and the EU proposal for the AI Act. The critical question raised in the article is what the role of sanctions is. I ask if official accountability could mean more of an opportunity to learn from mistakes, share knowledge and compensate for harm instead of control via sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article covert from a biblical point of view a social problem of permanent interest: poverty, seen as a state of precariousness caused by the multiple causes, some involuntary (the state of people left without support – widows, orphans, those with disabilities –, victims of natural disasters, immigrants, etc.) or voluntary (greed of peers, indifference of institutions empowered to watch over the observance of citizens’ rights, etc.) that led to it. It is, however, a scandal in a society that holds a theological view that God is a Father to all members of the People, from which it implicitly follows that the latter are brothers. However, such a scandal generated positions of some of those responsible, most often under pressure from prophets. These positions gradually led to the drafting of legislative codes designed to regulate scandalous social situations. When even these regulations did not eradicate poverty, then the vision of a new, messianic project was born. This project, which has as protagonist a descendant of King David, proposes a new vision (which I will develop in a later article) foreshadowed in several prophetic texts with a messianic theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relocation of Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to Nusantara Capital City in East Kalimantan will have significant implications for democratic rights and governance. However, this issue has been overlooked in most studies. Using interviews with politicians, bureaucrats and analysts, as well as focus group discussions and field observations, this article highlights various concerns surrounding the legal and administrative process of creating a new capital, including the rapid drafting of the relocation legislation, public opposition to the Nusantara Capital City Authority, the absence of local representation and the centralization of decision-making. All of this, the article contends, poses a threat to democracy in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our statute books use the word "any" ubiquitously in coverage and exclusion provisions. As any reader of the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation docket would know, a large number of cases turn on the contested application of this so-called universal quantifier. It is hard to make sense of the jurisprudence of "any." And any effort to offer a unified approach--knowing precisely when its scope is expansive (along the "literal-meaning" lines of "every" and "all") or confining (having a contained domain related to properties provided by contextual cues)--is likely to fail. This Article examines legislative drafting manuals, surveys centuries of Court decisions, and conducts in-depth pairwise comparisons of "any" cases to show the word's flexible set of uses in its multiple statutory guises. After evaluating evidence of the variability of "any," we recommend a new approach, a form of an "any" canon. We encourage adjudicators to appreciate the complexity of "any" more systematically and to consult a full range of sources--as even full-throated textualists have authorized from time to time--offering the relevant larger context judges will need to ascertain the scope of "any" in any given statutory scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most powerful executive actions, rulemaking by U.S. federal agencies involves all three branches and governs many issue areas, but some rules are routine and others are highly consequential. We build a new rule universe composed of nearly forty-thousand considered rules listed in the Unified Agenda since Spring 1995 and employ an item response model with 15 raters to generate integrated estimates of rule significance for each of the rules. To showcase the usefulness of this new measure, we propose and test competing models on agency productivity, finding that the president and Congress influence rule promulgation in a nuanced way. The president is dominant when agencies consider moderately noteworthy rules, and Congress has more influence over the most significant regulations, suggesting that the branches' influences vary with the consequential nature of the issues considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists commonly seek to make statements about how word use varies over circumstances—including time, partisan identity, or some other document-level covariate. For example, researchers might wish to know how Republicans and Democrats diverge in their understanding of the term "immigration." Building on the success of pretrained language models, we introduce the à la carte on text (conText) embedding regression model for this purpose. This fast and simple method produces valid vector representations of how words are used—and thus what words "mean"—in different contexts. We show that it outperforms slower, more complicated alternatives and works well even with very few documents. The model also allows for hypothesis testing and statements about statistical significance. We demonstrate that it can be used for a broad range of important tasks, including understanding US polarization, historical legislative development, and sentiment detection. We provide open-source software for fitting the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Public health scholarship has uncovered a wide range of strategies used by industry actors to promote their products and influence government regulation. Less is known about the strategies used by non-government organisations to attempt to influence commercial practices. This narrative review applies a political science typology to identify a suite of 'inside' and 'outside' strategies used by NGOs to attempt to influence the commercial determinants of health. Methods: We conducted a systematic search in Web of Science, ProQuest and Scopus. Articles were eligible for inclusion if they comprised an empirical study, explicitly sought to examine 'NGOs', were in English, and identified at least one NGO strategy aimed at commercial and/or government policy and practice. Results: One hundred forty-four studies met the inclusion criteria. Eight industry sectors were identified: extractive, tobacco, food, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, weapons, textiles and asbestos, and a small number of general studies. We identified 18 types of NGO strategies, categorised according to the target (i.e. commercial actor or government actor) and type of interaction with the target (i.e. inside or outside). Of these, five NGO 'inside' strategies targeted commercial actors directly: 1) participation in partnerships and multistakeholder initiatives; 2) private meetings and roundtables; 3) engaging with company AGMs and shareholders; 4) collaborations other than partnerships; and 5) litigation. 'Outside' strategies targeting commercial actors through the mobilisation of public opinion included 1) monitoring and reporting; 2) protests at industry sites; 3) boycotts; 4) directly engaging the public; and 5) creative use of alternative spaces. Four NGO 'inside' strategies directly targeting government actors included: 1) lobbying; 2) drafting legislation, policies and standards; 3) providing technical support and training; and 4) litigation. NGO 'outside' strategies targeting government included 1) protests and public campaigns; 2) monitoring and reporting; 3) forum shifting; and 4) proposing and initiating alternative solutions. We identified three types of NGO impact: substantive, procedural, and normative. Conclusion: The analysis presents a matrix of NGO strategies used to target commercial and government actors across a range of industry sectors. This framework can be used to guide examination of which NGO strategies are effective and appropriate, and which conditions enable NGO influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use the concept of epistemic othering to describe the subjectivation of people who experience debt problems in the legislative drafting process, and argue that the evidence‐based policy paradigm, together with its participatory dimension, produce a potentially harmful subject position for people who are considered vulnerable and irrational. By analysing the preparatory material of Finnish interest rate cap laws, we explore what is constructed as rational and possible in the legislative process, and how these modalities frame the use of expert knowledge. We argue that what is considered rational is constructed in terms of market logic, and what is construed as possible is heavily framed by law‐as‐knowledge. Together, market logic and law‐as‐knowledge form the preconditions for the use of expert knowledge. Ultimately, the way in which these three types of knowledge interact contributes to the epistemic othering of people who experience debt problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a range of factors associated with extradition and transnational online intellectual property offending by examining the Australian case of Hew Griffiths. In documenting key legal issues from available domestic and international verdicts examining this case, we show how broad legislative drafting in Australia works alongside the decision to initiate conspiracy charges to favour extradition. We also examine how Australian legal requirements that remove the presumption of bail for transnational fugitives limit the prospect of mounting a fair defence against extradition and during a foreign trial, and the limited direct impact of determinations by the United Nations Human Rights Committee on these national processes. We critically discuss the implications of these rulings in the Griffiths case in light of the evolving role of extradition law in a digital age and their implications on theories of criminal jurisdiction founded on the principle of extraterritoriality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, draft bills and regulations must be accompanied by the memorandum on the regulatory impact analysis. In addition, Act No. 26/2015 introduced the enforceability of regulatory impact analysis on families. However, it is not being properly performed. The main reason for this is the absence of a methodology guide with clear guidelines on sources, techniques and procedures to be used. Assessment tools and procedures are needed in order to guarantee valid and reliable analysis, as well as to tone down the burdens of the public administration professionals dealing with this task. This paper examines the introduction and development of regulatory impact analysis on families in Spain, which is considered an ex ante assessment tool for better regulation. It gives an overview of the current situation concerning the implementation of regulatory impact analysis at Central Administration and Autonomous Communities level. Reflecting the confusion and disparity of criteria when it comes to perform this type of assessment. And finally suggests guidelines to properly carry out regulatory impact analysis on families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The codification attempts of Criminal Law in the time of the Enlightenment of the 1790 s and the liberalism of the 1830 s and 1840 s are the focal points of the study. In order to draft bills to reform the feudal state based on customary law and privileges without changing the basic public law framework, nine so-called national regular committees were set up by Article 67 of Act 1791. The committees completed their work and sent their drafts, known as operatives, to the king between 1792 and 1795. After all, the completed operatives were not put on the agenda of the Parliament due to changes in the domestic and foreign policy status quo. They could find a way out from the archives of the Chancellery only thanks to the committees set up by Article 8 of Act 1827. These committees were responsible for reviewing the „forgotten" operatives, which were finally printed and sent to the counties for comments. The Hungarian liberal noble opposition was organised first as a movement and then as a party during these county debates (1831-1832) in order to replace the feudal system by manifesting the basic principles of the civil transition in the so-called laws of April. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in legislative drafting in Indonesia is compulsory. Output of the research is academic paper (Naskah Akademik) which supports rationale needed for legislative drafting. This academic paper also provides logical and objective argumentation on significance of legislation. Even though research in legislative drafting has become a compulsory since 2011, academics and practitioners found several weaknesses in research methodology. This article discusses two major issues related to research methodology in legislative drafting (developing the academic analysis). The first is dynamics of legislative policy developments related to research methodology for developing academic paper for legislative drafting in Indonesia. The second is weaknesses of legislative policy developments related to research methodology for legislative drafting in Indonesia. This article shows that the national policy on legislation did not provide comprehensive guidance on research methods for developing academic paper for legislative drafting. The existing guideline discussed general issues, which affect quality of academic paper for legislative drafting. As an addition, academic paper for legislative drafting is treated as not more than complementary document for the drafting because it provided neither scientific justification nor arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does ministries' capacity to draft legislation affect the political output of modern governments? This article combines a novel dataset describing the capacity of ministerial bureaucracies to attend to about 250 distinct policy issues with content-coded data on government legislation. The sample consists of Danish, Dutch and German governments, jointly spanning the time from 1995 to 2013. The analysis reveals three main findings: firstly, issue-specific bureaucratic capacity unconditionally increases governments' legislative activity; secondly, legislative activity is stifled if bureaucratic capacity is spread across different ministries; thirdly, against theoretical expectations the productive effect of bureaucratic capacity is not positively related to governments' issue salience. The results indicate that the design and resources of ministerial portfolios affect policy making in western governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay challenges the conventional wisdom on drafting evidence legislation and rules. Topics discussed are catalog approach for privileges and code approach for other areas of evidence doctrine, doctrinal area of privileges, doctrinal areas in evidence law including Model Code of Evidence, Uniform Rules of Evidence, California Evidence Code and the Federal Rules of Evidence, and convergence of both norms by broadening the wording of provisions governing privileges and evidence law.

In Canada, municipalities are involved in an increasing number of policy areas, but they remain largely absent from the nation's system of intergovernmental relations. Municipal representatives do not attend First Ministers' meetings that gather the Prime Minister and heads of each province and territory. They are also largely excluded from intergovernmental councils or committees focused on specific policy areas. Nor do they participate in the negotiation of most intergovernmental agreements. This paper explores how Canada's intergovernmental infrastructure could be reformed to include municipalities. It does so through an analysis of how other countries have made space for municipalities in their intergovernmental processes. After drawing five lessons from international experience, the paper concludes with four approaches to reforming intergovernmental relations in Canada: (1) ensure municipalities have the capacity, voice and structures to participate effectively in intergovernmental relations; (2) increase municipal involvement in provincial policy-making, including potentially through co-governed intergovernmental councils; (3) as far as possible, eliminate unfunded mandates (ie responsibilities devolved without adequate funding to discharge them) through, for example, provincial legislation or provincial-municipal intergovernmental agreements that require consultation on the fiscal impacts of draft legislation or regulation on municipalities; (4) strengthen trilateral (national/provincial/municipal) relations, including through location-specific or policy-specific agreements, and trilateral intergovernmental councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing calls for a new law criminalising cyberflashing – the digital distribution of penis images to another without consent – this article makes the case for a comprehensive, 'consent-based' criminal offence specifically targeting cyberflashing. It justifies this approach by examining the core wrongs of cyberflashing and suggests draft legislative text for such an offence. In making this case, the article analyses and rejects the Law Commission's recent proposal for a 'motive-based' cyberflashing law. Ultimately, it is argued that while the Law Commission's proposal is a welcome recognition of the harms of cyberflashing and need for reform, it does not go far enough to offer the redress victim-survivors are seeking, nor does it provide an appropriate normative foundation for education and preventative initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all pieces of legislation introduced for consideration are equally likely to be successful. The characteristics of legislation's cosponsors can influence bill passage rates. Despite facing marginalization in legislative bodies and more electoral vulnerability, women are effective lawmakers. We argue that one way by which women overcome marginalization and gendered expectations of performance is bill success from legislation cosponsored with other women. Testing this expectation on bills (140,000+) introduced in U.S. state legislatures in forty states in 2015, we find increased bill success from women's cosponsorship with each other and women from the other party. Using variation in the share of women in legislative chambers and in legislative leadership, we find evidence to suggest that women's success emerges both from marginalization and gendered opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that socio‐legal scholars study statutes and legislative drafting on their own terms. Legislative drafting may seem to have little relevance within approaches that emphasize law's wider social effects. Yet statutes can be defamiliarized, and the dynamics through which they are drafted better understood. This can help statutes to answer for their legal and social power and also assist scholars working in law and other disciplines to grasp the distinctiveness of legal doctrine. Drawing on findings from my current research, I argue that sociologies of legislative drafting could contribute to, and be informed by, two contemporary debates: first, the status of legal technical expertise, and second, the aesthetics of law. Unpicking these thickly knotted ontologies of law and drafting could be achieved through historical, ethnographic, and experimental visual methods. These methods potentially help us to tackle something akin to an 'obviation of legal form' through which statutory text is seen to be distinct from, and subservient to, law's legal and political substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Joint Federal Committee (G-BA) has taken a position on the "Healthy Heart Act" and criticized that the proposed solutions undermine the goal. The Federal Ministry of Health has presented a draft bill for the law, which aims to reduce the number of cardiovascular diseases. The G-BA and other organizations were asked to comment on the planned changes to the law. The Chairman of the G-BA, Prof. Josef Hecken, expressed concerns regarding the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the proposed measures and emphasized the need for improved individual health literacy. It is pointed out that the benefits of the law are intended to be introduced without being evaluated for their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Concerns have already been expressed from various sides as to whether the ministry takes these seriously. [Extracted from the article]

The GKV Spitzenverband opposes secret prices for pharmaceuticals as they increase costs without improving healthcare. Secret prices undermine the principle of cost-effectiveness and deprive doctors of price transparency. The German Bundestag is called upon to remove secret prices from the draft legislation. A survey shows that Germany's economic dependence on other world regions is increasing and doubts about the competitiveness of the German location exist. To secure the economic future, investments in research and development as well as diversification of supply security should be made. An international research team has gained new insights into the SARS coronavirus-2, particularly regarding the role of the serine protease TMPRSS2 in enhancing cell infection. These findings could contribute to the development of future treatment and prevention strategies. [Extracted from the article]

Sustainable degrowth offers effective alternative strategies for tackling social and environmental problems such as climate crisis, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and species hecatomb. However, it plays a marginal role in policy. Moreover, researchers need to operationalise many degrowth proposals in a more sufficient way for the policy. This mainly conceptual-methodological article conceptualises the problem of sustainable degrowth in policy as the problem of knowledge utilisation. How well research papers on the topic adapt to the needs of policy-makers is an important factor influencing this utilisation. This adaptation is under the control of researchers and may be seen as a necessary first step in the introduction of degrowth proposals into policy-making and further implementation. I argue that translating research papers into legislative drafts by researchers can be understood as adaptation of these papers to the policy-makers' needs. This is because the law can be understood as universal basis of public policies and fundamental language to express these policies. The legal system has a systematic, hierarchical, and logical structure while its language tends to be precise, clear, and unambiguous. Legal language may also be salient for many policy-makers. I labelled this way of adaptation as the Translational Legal Approach to Knowledge Utilisation (TLA). It can be applied beyond texts on sustainable degrowth as well. Based on the literature review, I theoretically and conceptually discuss the aforementioned hypotheses by looking at the corresponding criteria of research adaptation with characteristics of law and legal language. I provide the strongest support for the theses that translation of research papers into provisions of legislative drafts can increase readability, comprehensibility, precision, and operationalisation of degrowth research proposals, as well as helps to give them more systemic nature and incorporate policy-makers' context. Future research is needed to create a methodological framework for TLA as well as to empirically verify hypotheses made in this article. • Degrowth plays a marginal role in policies and needs better operationalisation. • The role of degrowth in policy can be seen as a problem of knowledge utilisation. • Law could be a common language between researchers and policy-makers. • Translating research papers into legislative drafts adapts them for policy-makers. • Translating degrowth proposals into legislative drafts supports their utilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After having played a minor role in European politics for a long time, national parliaments were empowered to "guardians of subsidiarity" under the Lisbon Treaty. This article scrutinizes whether they have succeeded in influencing European Union legislation with reasoned opinions over the past ten years. A statistical analysis of all opinions up to 2020 shows that the Commission recalls draft legislative acts significantly more often after receiving at least one reprimand. A comparison of the parliamentary chambers suggests that these withdrawal decisions were not driven by strategic considerations such as a member state's voting weight in the Council. Both indicate that the "Early Warning System" works better in practice than previously assumed. This result should encourage members of national parliaments to make more active use of this instrument of subsidiarity control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the mechanics of the bankruptcy system, including the automatic stay, as well as the problems that led to the system's reform. It mentions novel solution and legislative drafting, combining elements of the current approaches to address their failures, including the effects on chapter 7 of Bankruptcy Code trustees and the creditors' interests. It also mentions U.S. Congress's goal of deterring repeat-filing debtors.

The article is based on the observation of an increasingly poor quality of legislation in Italy which has led to citizens experiencing disaffection towards regulatory instruments and, at the same time, mistrust in the institutions responsible for producing, implementing and enforcing legislation. This situation has certainly become more and more serious during the Covid-19 pandemic with the adoption of regulatory acts containing rules that, on the one hand, severely restrict citizens' freedoms and, on the other, are improvised, often contradictory and difficult to understand and interpret. Starting from this observation, the article analyses the reasons of this crisis, focusing on the complexity of a multi-level system, with the increasing influence of the legislation coming from the European Union, and on the growing weakness of parliamentary institutions and the consequent increase in government legislative power through 'decree-laws'. The urgency and 'occasionality' that frequently characterises these law-making procedures are not compatible with a legislative design focused on better regulation tools, thereby making the commitment to clarity, consistency and homogeneity of legislative acts completely regressive. In this context, it is essential to increase the transparency of the legislative process and to enable citizens and stakeholders to take part in it, thereby restoring confidence in legislation. It is also necessary to bring together in the legislative rule-making process different professional skills and knowledge: legal, linguistic, economic-financial, statistical, social and even behavioural sciences. This will shape legislative intervention geared towards making regulatory acts as capable as possible of producing a phenomenon of spontaneous compliance with the objectives set by the legislation. Finally, these tools must be accompanied by a shift in political culture and a change in vision shared by all institutional actors, starting from Parliament, in order to recompose the material Constitution of the country on new bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, policymakers have begun to problematize how legislation stands in the way of the digitalization of the public sector. We are witnessing the emergence of a new phenomenon, digital-ready legislation, which implies that, whenever possible, new legislation should build on simple rules and unambiguous terminology to reduce the need for professional (human) discretion and allow for the extended use of automated case processing in public-sector organizations. Digital-ready legislation has potentially wide-ranging consequences because it creates the conditions for how public organizations are digitalized. The processes, practices, choices, and responsibilities for drafting digital-ready legislation, however, are not well-described or debated. Digital-ready legislation is a dormant issue. This paper develops the notion of the "double darkness" of digitalization to account for this. Based on a qualitative study, the paper investigates how digital-ready legislation as a sociotechnical arrangement is shaped by policy tools and by a complex, collaborative process where responsibility for legislation is fragmented. It argues that although the policy tools are aimed at making actors responsible for digitalization and creating clarity about the process, actors seem to be reluctant to take on the responsibility for making political decisions related to digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on an initiative that gathered a group of lawyers to draft legislation with the aim of paralleling the Arizona's civil rights law that would enable the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to grant deferral jurisdiction to the Arizona Attorney General's Office to handle cases on sex discrimination in employment. Topics discussed include the emergence of sex discrimination in employment in the state, and developments in the handling of such cases in the state.

This paper looks at how legislative quality is addressed in Canada by private (non-Executive) members of the two legislative chambers forming part of the federal Parliament (the Senate and the House of Commons). It considers legislative quality from three perspectives (1. Policy and Politics, 2. Legality, 3. Accessibility / Intelligibility) and reviews the resources and mechanisms parliamentarians have at their disposal to assess and improve the quality of legislation. The paper concludes that, while there is some potential for considerable parliamentary contribution to legislative quality, it is in fact relatively limited. This largely results from the dominant role the Executive plays in the development and enactment of legislation. The paper suggests the current pandemic crisis might provide an opportunity to re-evaluate this dominance and approaches to addressing legislative quality in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, there is no exhaustive institutionalised process of scrutiny for parliament to ensure the quality of laws. Neither the members of parliament nor the parliamentary administration are tasked with this quality review. In fact, the German legislative procedure draws on a pluralistic concept of quality review: all organs and persons involved in legislation are called upon in order to ensure good legislative quality. This concept stresses the political reality of the principle of democracy, rather than the legal rationality resulting from the rule of law, and therefore accepts inferior laws based on democratic legitimacy rather than good laws that in turn do not rely upon the expertise of democratically non-legitimated committees. An equilibrium between these poles can only be found in time: after all, laws are amendable, thus adaptive and improvable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the case of Spain as part of a broader comparative study on parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation, looking in particular at the role played by the Letrados de las Cortes Generales, the corps of high-ranking parliamentary civil servants, or clerks, of the Spanish bicameral legislature. As in many other countries, the Spanish political landscape has witnessed an increasing polarisation in the last decade which has led to the fragmentation of the Congreso de los Diputados, or Lower House, once dominated by a two-party system. This has severely affected the parliament´s legislative function. Fewer laws are passed, and there has been a shift in the origin of legislative initiative. Government bills are no longer so easily passed, whereas non-governmental bills have more chances now of becoming laws than before. Against this background, and given the lack of specific parliamentary bodies or guidelines for the scrutiny of the quality of legislation, the Letrados de las Cortes Generales seem essential in contributing to improving the quality of bills, whichever its origin, throughout the legislative procedure, until their passing into laws. This article explores at length their role and the different steps and ways in which they do this. It also analyses the progress in setting standards and bodies for Legislative Drafting by the Spanish Government since, in the absence of specific ones for parliament, Government's Guidelines are usually applied by the Letrados in their work. To illustrate the current debate on the quality of legislation, the evolution of the Spanish Constitutional Court's rulings on the matter is also briefly outlined. In conclusion, and though limited to legal and technical aspects, the Letrados de las Cortes Generaleś scrutiny of bills does contribute, to a large albeit imperfect extent, to improving the quality of legislation in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to set the scene for the following special issue, which contains four papers relating to research on parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation in different jurisdictions. In Continental Europe, Parliaments (although in a rather different range: more in countries such as Italy and Spain, less in countries such as Germany) have developed a more-in-depth approach in scrutinising the quality of legislation, i.e. a set of tools, standards and bodies to scrutinise it downstream, than that of Westminster jurisdictions. In the latter, a high-standard quality of legislation is guaranteed upstream by having bills drafted by Parliamentary Counsel, although in the United Kingdom there is currently a debate concerning the opportunity to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation. The hypotheses of this research were that the aforementioned models of parliamentary scrutiny are differently shaped in those jurisdictions due to the drafting model and the form of government established there. Against this background, the United States Congress is a very different animal: due to the peculiarities of the legislative process in the presidential system, the scrutiny in Congress relies on multiple parties. The reason why articles have been commissioned here is to test now on a larger scale the aforementioned hypotheses, which have already been partially proved in a previous article mainly concerning Italy (E. Albanesi, 'Parliamentary Scrutiny of the Quality of Legislation within Europe' (2021) Statute Law Review). This time the analysis will focus on two Continental European parliamentary systems (Spain and Germany), one jurisdiction belonging to the Parliamentary Counsel/Westminster model (Canada) and one presidential system (the U.S.). The articles published here seem to support on a larger scale the aforementioned hypotheses. The article on Canada also helps reflect upon the opportunity to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation in Westminster jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the different denominations used in the Spanish Criminal Procedure Law to refer to the passive subject of criminal proceedings. Some of these concepts have been considered a stigma for producing a false identification associated with the notion of guilt. They show the historical evolution of the passive subject up to the recognition of a true guaranteeing status such as that of the Draft Bill of the Criminal Procedure Law of 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, since the late Justice Scalia joined the Court and ushered in a new era of text-focused statutory analysis, there has been a marked move towards the holistic interpretation of statutes and "making sense of the corpus juris." In particular, Justices on the modern Supreme Court now regularly compare or analogize between statutes that contain similar words or phrases--what some have called the "whole code rule." Despite the prevalence of this interpretive practice, however, scholars have paid little attention to how the Court actually engages in whole code comparisons on the ground. This Article provides the first empirical and doctrinal analysis of how the modern Supreme Court uses whole code comparisons, based on a study of 532 statutory cases decided during the Roberts Court's first twelve-and-a-half Terms. The Article first catalogues five different forms of whole code comparisons employed by the modern Court and notes that the different forms rest on different justifications, although the Court's rhetoric has tended to ignore these distinctions. The Article then notes several problems, beyond the unrealistic one-Congress assumption identified by other scholars, that plague the Court's current approach to most forms of whole code comparisons. For example, most of the Court's statutory comparisons involve statutes that have no explicit connection to each other, and nearly one-third compare statutes that regulate entirely unrelated subject areas. Moreover, more than a few of the Court's analogies involve generic statutory phrases--such as "because of" or "any"--whose meaning is likely to depend on context rather than some universal rule of logic or linguistics. This Article argues that, in the end, the Court's whole code comparisons amount to judicial drafting presumptions that assign fixed meanings to specific words, phrases, and structural choices. The Article critiques this judicial imposition of drafting conventions on Congress--noting that it is unpredictable, leads to enormous judicial discretion, reflects an unrealistic view of how Congress drafts, and falls far outside the judiciary's institutional expertise. It concludes by recommending that the Court limit its use of whole code comparisons to situations in which congressional drafting practices, rule of law concerns, or judicial expertise justify the practice--e.g., where Congress itself has made clear that one statute borrowed from or incorporated the provisions of another, or where judicial action is necessary to harmonize two related statutes with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As representative democracy has come under criticism from populists and advocates of 'participatory democracy', parliaments have responded by expanding their engagements throughout the governance process. Parliaments around the world are participating in the development of policy proposals including in dialogue with citizens, the shaping of draft legislation, debate and adoption of legislative proposals, in post-legislative scrutiny, and in government oversight and audit. The article explores the motivators for these enhanced roles, the opportunities and challenges entailed in a parliamentary full-cycle approach, and makes recommendations for parliaments and parliamentary development actors to enable successful implementation of an expanded and deepened role for parliaments as core institutions of representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative drafting mistakes can upset statutory schemes. The Affordable Care Act was nearly undone by such mistakes. The recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is rife with them. Traditional legal scholarship has examined whether courts should help resolve Congress' mistakes. But courts have remained stubbornly resistant to implementing fixes. In the face of legislative error and judicial inaction, administrative agencies have taken it upon themselves to fix legislative drafting mistakes. This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of these "agency legislative fixes." It identifies features and complexities of such fixes that existing scholarship does not capture. It also describes the behind-the-scenes, post-legislative dialogue between Congress and agency officials about such fixes, which is frequently hidden from public view. The Article shows that agencies routinely fix legislative drafting mistakes in a manner that is nontransparent and motivated by factors external to the legal framework. This Article argues that agency legislative fixes conflict with fundamental constitutional and democratic values such as legislative supremacy and agency legitimacy. They also exacerbate problematic agency guidance practices. Accordingly, this Article proposes changes to legislative and regulatory practices that may better address legislative drafting mistakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the commission of international crimes -that is, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide-prison sentence seems to be the only one with the capacity to express the especial condemn that this international illicit deserves. However, in recent transitional justice processes, alternatives to prison and lenient sentences (where the proportionality principle could be questioned) starts to prevail. Taken into consideration the growth of this tendency, the present work examines its legality through the legislative draft of transitional justice of El Salvador. To achieve this aim, and once the case has been contextualized, States obligation to sanction those crimes will be analyzed, taking into consideration the difficulties that causes its application in complex transitional processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]