Good Law Initiative Launch Event, 16 April 2013: Tweets and Resources

This post links to tweets and selected resources from the 16 April 2013 launch event for the Good Law Initiative, a project of the UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel.

The main page for the initiative appears to be called Good law – Detailed guidance – GOV.UK.

Click here for video of the event.

The Office’s announcement of the Good Law initiative is called Join the good law conversation.

Twitter tweets from the launch event are now archived in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event, and for other Good Law activities, is #goodlaw

On 16 April 2013 the Office published a new report entitled When laws become too complex: Review by Office of the Parliamentary Counsel into the causes of complex legislation, which is also called the OPC Good Law Report or the Good Law Report.

For more information about the Good Law Initiative, please see Good law – Detailed guidance, or Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible.

HT @johnlsheridan

Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible

The UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is launching “the ‘Good Law’ initiative, with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation,” at an event to be held 16 April 2013, at the Institute for Government, London, England.

The Twitter hashtag for the initiative is #goodlaw

Here are excerpts of the announcement:

Legislation is difficult. The volume of statute law and regulations, together with their piecemeal structure, level of detail, and frequent amendments, mean that citizens find law complex, hard to understand, and difficult to comply with. That can generate barriers to economic activity, as well as burdens for individuals, businesses, and communities. It obstructs good government, and it undermines the rule of law.

Efforts have been made to address aspects of the problem. Parliamentary Counsel has adopted a simple, plain English style. The National Archives have improved access to up-to-date legislation through legislation.gov.uk. The Law Commission has a programme of special Bills for law reform, consolidation and repeals. But the problem remains.

At this event, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launches the ‘good law’ initiative with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation. Join us to discuss what ‘good law’ means in practice. What do users expect from legislation? How can we make it more accessible? When is complexity in legislation desirable? And when is unavoidable?

I believe that at the launch event, John Sheridan of The National Archives will give a presentation about the role of legislation.gov.uk in the Good Law initiative.

For more information about the launch event or to register for the event, please see the event announcement.

Click here for more information about the principles underlying the Good Law project.

HT @johnlsheridan

Good Law

Today in a conversation with John Sheridan of The National Archives and Richard Heaton of the UK Cabinet Office, I learned about the concept of Good Law (designated by the hashtag #goodlaw) which I’d seen John referring to recently.

They explained that Good Law is a new idea they are currently developing. Good Law has (at least) three aspects:

• Quality of substantive legislation, in terms of appropriateness, effectiveness, etc.;
• Complexity of legislation: When is complexity in legislation a bad thing? What are the causes of complexity?
• Intellectual accessibility or Readability of legislation, for example in terms of principles of plain language, etc., and
• Technological accessibility of legislation: in terms of retrievability, usability, etc.

(And I hope John will correct me if I’ve gotten any of this wrong.)

This is, I think, a very intriguing idea, particularly for the legal informatics community, because members of that community include those who work on improving technological accessibility and usability of electronic legal information, and those who work on making the law more comprehensible to the public, through means such as public legal education and the promotion of plain language principles.

So Good Law has the potential to engage many subgroups within and near our field, including legal informatics scholars, developers of legal information systems, the free access to law community, the plain legal language community, law librarians, advocates of democracy and of public participation in government, and advocates of law reform.

The inclusion of both intellectual and technological accessibility within a single concept that is related to policy action is extremely exciting. I look forward to learning more.

John’s and Richard’s comments about #goodlaw today are at the following links:

• https://twitter.com/johnlsheridan/status/278635094363746304
• https://twitter.com/johnlsheridan/status/278636000115310592
• https://twitter.com/RHCabinetOffice/status/278639630180560898
• http://twitter.com/RHCabinetOffice/status/279300201322258432

To see additional comments about this post, please see the version of the post on Google +.

[NOTE: Updated 13 December 2012 to add Richard's point about complexity of legislation.]