Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
representatives of the people care for the litigation or trouble
or expense that their own slovenliness causes the people! For the
necessity of political compromise is no excuse for this.
I therefore urged before the National Association of State Libraries,
at their annual meeting of 1909, that they should use their influence
with the various State governments at least--"1, that all revisions
be authenticated, authorized, and published by the State; 2, that
the annual laws be separated, public from private, and be printed by
numbered chapters arranged either chronologically or topically; 3,
that the indexes be arranged under the forty general heads used by
the New York State Library in its annual digest, with such additional
heads as may, perhaps, prove necessary in some States, such as, for
instance, Louisiana, which has subjects and titles of jurisprudence
not known to the ordinary common-law States; 4, that the constitutions
be printed with the laws; 5, that every State, under a law, employ a
permanent, paid parliamentary or legislative draftsman whose duty it
shall be to recast, at least in matters of style and arrangement, all
acts before they are passed to be engrossed."
Any private member introducing a bill can, of course, avail himself
of the draftsman's services before the bill is originally drawn. His
advice may be required by the legislature or by legislative committees
on the question whether the proposed legislation is necessary, that
is to say, whether it is not covered by laws previously existing. It
shall be his duty then to edit the laws, arrange them for publication,
and to authenticate by his signature the volumes of the annual laws.
One person is better than two or three for such work, but he should
be paid a very large salary so that he can afford to make it his life
work. He should be appointed for a very long term and should have
ample clerical assistance. It should also be his duty to correspond
and exchange information with similar officials in other States.
In other words, he with his assistants should be the legislative
reference department. These recommendations were duly referred to the
Committee on Uniformity in preparation of session laws.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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