CPL Seminar: 'Legislative Structures and Design'

Sir Stephen Laws, KCB, QC, will be visiting the Faculty, principally to speak to LLM students following the Legislation paper about the processes of drafting and enacting legislation. As this is a matter of considerable importance in public law, members of staff and PhD students are invited to attend and participate in the seminar.

Title: 'Legislative Structures and Design: How the political, procedural and historical context in which legislation is drafted influence what an Act says'

Summary: Sir Stephen will first discuss procedural context (Government procedures before introducing a Bill to Parliament and then parliamentary procedure during the passage of the Bill). These are matters which are often not apparent to those who have to interpret legislation, even when they attempt a contextual reading of it. He will then illustrate the link between that, political (in the broadest sense) context and historical context and the form and wording of statutory provisions by comparing and contrasting provisions on similar, regulatory matters in three different Acts: the Telecommunications Act 1984, the Water Act 1989, and the Communications Act 2003.

Discussion of those Acts will focus on the following provisions:

• (1) Sections 3 to 19 of the Telecommunications Act 1984;
• (2) Sections 7 to 25 of the Water Act 1989; and
• (3) Sections 3 to 9, 33 to 50 and 94 to 104 of the Communications Act 2003.

Please note that these Acts as originally enacted (as well as up to date versions) are accessible from the www. legislation.gov.uk web site.

About the speaker: Sir Stephen Laws graduated in 1972 from the University of Bristol, where he lectured for a year before going to the Bar and joining the Government Legal Service and working in the Home Office for a year. In 1991, he joined the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, rising to be First Parliamentary Counsel 2006-2012. Among his many other roles, he was a member of the McKay Commission on the consequences of devolution for the House of Commons (2012-13) and the Advisory Panel to the Strathclyde Review of Secondary Legislation and the primacy of the House of Commons (2015), and chairman of the Advisory Board of the Big Data For Law Project (2014-16). He was appointed Hon. QC and KCB in 2011, is an Hon. Senior Research Fellow of UCL, and holds the degree of LLD honoris causa from the Universities of Bristol and London.