Training of Legislative Counsel: learning to draft without Nellie.

There is a worldwide shortage of legislative drafters, while the volume and complexity of government legislative programmes is everywhere on the rise. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of training for legislative counsel must be an important part of the response to this imbalance in an area crucial to good governance. In the conventional view of legislative drafting, the knowledge and skills required by drafters are often narrowly conceived and training is treated primarily as a matter of acquiring experience on the job by observing how senior drafters worked - 'sitting with Nellie'. The author believes that the conventional view underestimates both (i) the scope of the knowledge and skills that are required in the drafting activity; and (ii) the range of techniques that can be used to teach and learn the required knowledge and skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]