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48 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 329 (1980)
Victorian Reforms in Legislative Drafting

handle is hein.journals/tijvrec48 and id is 331 raw text is: VICTORIAN REFORMS IN LEGISLATIVE DRAFTING by FRED BOWERS (Vancouver) Among the many political, administrative and social reforms for which we are indebted to the Victorians is one which has not received much attention, despite its far-reaching effects in government and society as a whole; this is the gradual improvement in the language and form of Acts of Parliament brought about by the efforts of a handful of men - politicians, lawyers and civil servants - throughout the nineteenth century. The merest glance at the two extracts below, one from an Act of 1801 and the other from an Act of 1891, reveals a tremendous change in expression and form, from a dense, verbose and repetitive style to one of clarity and accessibility. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the major contributions to this marked improvement of the expression and form of British statutes. Pre-Victorian Drafting and its Critics Up to the early nineteenth century bills had been prepared in a variety of ways'. The earliest statutes were drafted by judges of the King's Council in response to petitions to the monarch; they were generally short, written in Latin or French up to the end of the fifteenth century and in English thereafter. As the functions of parliament changed from that of a King's Council which made petitions to that of a legislature which initiated bills, the drafting of bills passed to private members or their legal assistants - usually conveyancers. The first officially appointed bill draftsman was a William Harrison whom William Pitt established as Parliamen- tary Counsel to the Treasury in 1798 to prepare Treasury bills and to help in the drafting of legislation in other departments as time permitted. This post lapsed with its holder in 1837, and the Home Office took responsibility for drafting, appointing Drinkwater Bethune in 1837, followed by Walter Coulson in 1848. Despite these appointments, a great deal of drafting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was done by conveyancers - a practice which was both expensive and unwieldy. No uniformity of style and language was possible, and the peculiar inflation and repetition characteristic of conveyancers' language con- tinued unabated. (Various reasons have been offered for the introduction of prolix expressions such as 'all and every', 'shall and may', 'from and after' which are particularly noticeable in legal language from the Tudor period on; the kindest reason is that English terms were unsettled and so needed reinforcement from decided French terms; 'deem and consider', 'fit and proper', 'free and clear' are typical examples of English terms followed by French, but the practice of doubling extended to having two perfectly comprehensible English terms as in 'have and hold', 'let or hindrance'. A less kind explanation is that printing permitted and even 1. See S.G.G. Edgar, Craies on Statute Law, 7th ed. London, 1971,21-22 and footnotes for a brief account of early drafting.

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