Curriculum Development and Training in Legislative Drafting
| Author | Commonwealth Secretariat |
| Pages | 407-416 |
Page 407
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At the meeting of Commonwealth Law Ministers in St Vincent and the Grenadines in November 2002, Law Ministers recognised the continuing problems in many Commonwealth countries in attracting, training, and retaining legal drafting staff. This has impacted adversely on the quality of legislation dealing with complex issues, and law reform programmes in countries. Law Ministers mandated the Commonwealth Secretariat to arrange shorter training courses to supplement in-house training.
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A short-term curriculum to be taught over a 12-week period, was developed under the auspices of the Commonwealth Secretariat in November 2003: Annex. A workshop was then held for the Caribbean region in November 2003 where the curriculum was modified to suit the requirements of the region. A further outcome of that workshop was a decision that a short-term programme be established at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Barbados.
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The Faculty of Law at UWI revived its LLM Legislative Drafting course towards the end of 2004. How the short-term curriculum can be integrated into the Legislative Drafting component of the LLM programme is currently under consideration.
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For the Africa region, the short-term course will be established at the Ghana School of Law in January 2006. Heads of drafting offices from African Commonwealth countries met in Accra, Ghana, in June 2005 to examine the curriculum and lay down the road map for preparations for the launch of the course. The course will be funded for the first three years by the Commonwealth Secretariat through its CFTC fund with a view that by the end of that period the course will be self-sustaining.
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The short-term course will be introduced to the Asia and Pacific regions with a view to establishing it in appropriate institutes or integrating it to existing programmes in law schools.
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At their meeting in October 2004, Senior Officials discussed at length the shortage of drafters in developing Commonwealth countries and appealed to the Commonwealth Secretariat to develop training programmes for legislative drafters and support assignment of personnel to Attorneys-General offices and offices of Parliamentary Counsel taking advantage of the Commonwealth network.
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In considering the problem of retention, Senior Officials noted that developing countries had considered imposing measures to retain the services of legislative drafters who benefited from assistance programmes. One such measure was a requirement to enter into a bond with the relevant Government obliging legislative drafters to serve a minimum time before they could leave the service or to repay the cost of the training they received.
Page 408
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Law Ministers may wish to endorse:
(a) the observations and requests made by Senior Officials to the Commonwealth Secretariat to develop training programmes for legislative drafters;
(b) the recommendation by Senior Officials for countries to consider imposing measures to retain the services of legislative drafters who benefit from assistance programmes.
Page 409
Professor Keith Patchett
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At the Meeting of Commonwealth Law Ministers in St Vincent in November 2002 concern was once again expressed about the high turnover of staff in legislative drafting and about the expense of some existing arrangements for training. Suggestions were made that more short-term training should be made available.
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The following curriculum is designed to provide foundation training for relatively new entrants to drafting offices that can be delivered in the equivalent of 3 months' full time study. It derives from the author's experience in organising and delivering full and part time courses of lengths varying from 6 months to 2 weeks and authoring and assessing for the Commonwealth Distance Training Course in Legislative Drafting, a joint initiative of the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth of Learning.
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Training of new entrants to anything like full competence cannot be provided in a single short course. Such competence is achieved only with experience from performing the job that is acquired over a period of years. The aim of a foundation course, as the term implies, should be to lay a solid grounding in those matters that permit useful drafting tasks to be confidently and reliably assigned to tyro drafters sooner. Accordingly, the objective should be to develop competence in the basic essentials of drafting, rather than to expose the trainees to an academic study of the subject.
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The course must be concerned, therefore, with developing those skills, techniques and knowhow that are the fundamentals of legislative drafting and basic to the actual practice of drafting. The learning focus throughout should be on acquiring the practical skills and sound methodologies for performing the most common and important drafting tasks, rather than covering the drafting of all types of legislation.
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The curriculum should enable trainees to learn what to do, when to do it, importantly how to do it, but also why it is best done in that way. So, it should comprise an integrated programme to provide knowledge about drafting approaches and techniques and to develop the skills necessary to put those into effect.
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A drafting course should reflect best practice in the drafting offices from which the trainees are drawn. Accordingly, the course content should be the result of close co-operation between the trainers and senior members of those offices. Every training course should be thoroughly evaluated after its completion, not least by the drafting office from which a trainee has been drawn, with a view to improving and refining future courses.
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Preferably, a foundation course should be structured as a series of building blocks that:
* introduce the trainees systematically to analytical methods, composition skills and drafting approaches and techniques; andPage 410
* then extend and reinforce these through constant practical drafting exercises replicating the most common and important drafting functions in ways that approximate as closely to actual drafting practice as is possible in a training setting.
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The emphasis should be on learning by doing, i.e. through undertaking frequent drafting assignments and activities. Wherever possible, these should be individually moderated and subjected to detailed feedback given, where possible, in individual tuition sessions. This replicates to an extent the way in which pupil drafters learn on the job from their seniors.
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Such an approach calls for the number of participants on a course to be small enough to permit this regular individual tuition and feedback on personal progress. It also requires this tuition to be provided by persons with drafting experience who are able to allocate the necessary time to undertake regular training sessions. The whole training programme should be co-ordinated by a training director who is responsible for overseeing the progress of the individual...
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