Paper explores consolidation of Irish legislation

One of its proposals is moving to a US or New Zealand model of legislative consolidation to create comprehensive law in “priority areas”.

In the United States, all federal law can be found online under 54 subject-headings, called Titles, of the United States Code. One of the best-known is Title 11, the bankruptcy code.

Under New Zealand’s Legislation Act 2012, three-year programmes of consolidation must be presented to parliament. The first consolidation programme was presented to the New Zealand House of Representatives in 2014, covering the period 2015-2017.

The Issues Paper on Conslidation and Online Publication of Legislation forms part of the Commission’s fourth programme of law reform.

It describes significant improvements in recent years in making legislation in its enacted form available free online, but says it remains very difficult to trace up-to-date legislation on many topics without spending a significant amount of time doing this.

The paper argues that this is not satisfactory from a constitutional or rule of law perspective, or from an economic perspective.

Submissions on the issues paper can be submitted to p4p11@lawreform.ie or by other means detailed here.

Contributors are requested to make their submissions/comments, if possible, before close of business on Friday 24 February 2017.