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\"This book for elementary readers highlights the sequence of events from the idea to implementation. Full-color photographs and a timeline support each step in the process, from an idea for a new law through writing a bill, getting Congress to pass it and the president signing it into law. A glossary, further resources, and an index are included\"-- Provided by publisher.

First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company. CHAPTER I. Introduction: Race, Regulations, and Trust Traditional Styles of Regulatory Writing Contemporary Arguments for Plain English Regulations Organization of Book CHAPTER II. Case Study I—Texas Black Codes of 1866: Identifying Discourse Markers of Trust Identifying Discourse Markers of Trust Discourse Analysis of Texas Black Codes Findings of Discourse Analysis CHAPTER III. Texas Laws and Tacit Laws: Redefining Black Labor from \"The Nadir\" to Civil Rights Redefining Apprenticeship and Contract Labor Rationale for Contemporary Studies CHAPTER IV. Case Study II—Texas Agencies: The Challenge of Evoking Trust Contextual Inquiry Meeting at State Agency Artifacts Collected during Contextual Inquiry Study Process Meeting with Group of Policy Writers Analysis of Regulatory Writing Tasks CHAPTER V. Case Study III—Contemporary Black Business Owners: Legalese, Plain English, or Both? The Focus Group in Context CHAPTER VI. An Invention Heuristic for Regulatory Writing Implications of Contextual Inquiry and Focus Group Studies What Information Do New Policy Writers Need to Know? What Style Meets the Needs of the Government Agency and the Public? A Rulemaking Heuristic to Evoke Trust in Distrustful Audiences Considerations for the Future of Regulatory Writing APPENDICES Appendix I: Texas Black Codes in Legalese and Plain English Appendix II: Rhetorical Analysis of Texas Black Codes in Legalese and Plain English Appendix III: Contextual Inquiry Transcript Appendix IV: The Focus Group Meeting REFERENCES INDEX

This book defines rules and laws and describes how a bill becomes a law.

This is the second of two Articles relaying the results of the most extensive survey to date of 137 congressional drafters about the doctrines of statutory interpretation and administrative delegation. The first Article focused on our respondents' knowledge and use of the interpretive principles that courts apply. This second Article moves away from the judicial perspective. Our findings here highlight the overlooked legislative underbelly: the personnel, structural, and process-related factors that, our respondents repeatedly volunteered, drive the details of the drafting process more than judicial rules of interpretation. These factors range from the fragmentation caused by the committee system, to the centrality of nonpartisan professional staff in the drafting of statutory text, to the use of increasingly unorthodox legislative procedures—each of which, our respondents told us, affects statutory consistency and use of legislative history in different and important ways. Our respondents also painted a picture of legislative staffers in a primary interpretive conversation with agencies, not with courts, and as using different kinds of signals for their communications with agencies than courts consider. Most of the structural, personnel, and process-related influences that our respondents emphasized have not been recognized by courts or scholars, but understanding them calls into question almost every presumption of statutory interpretation in current deployment. The findings undermine the claims of both textualists and purposivists that their theories are most democracy enhancing, because neither makes satisfactory efforts to really reflect congressional expectations. Our findings challenge textualism's operating assumption that text is always the best evidence of the legislative bargain and suggest more relevant—but still formalist—structural features that might do better. Our findings further reveal that, although purposivists or eclectic theorists may have the right idea with a more contextual approach, many of the factors on which they focus are not the same ones that Congress utilizes. With respect to delegation, our findings suggest that, for both types of theorists, Chevron now seems too text- and court-centric to actually capture congressional intent to delegate, although that has been its asserted purpose. In the end, our findings raise the question whether the kind of \"faithful agent\" approach to interpretation that most judges currently employ—one aimed at effectuating legislative deals and often focused on granular textual details—can ever be successful. We thus look to different paradigms less dependent on how Congress works, including rule-of-law and pragmatic approaches to interpretation. These alternatives respond to the problem of the sausage factory, but pose different challenges in light of the modern judicial sensibility's pronounced concern with legislative supremacy.

Congress has a bureaucracy. Legal scholarship, judicial discourse, and doctrine about Congress and statutes have focused almost entirely on elected members of Congress and the ascertainability of their purported intentions about policymaking and statutory language. In recent years, we and others have broadened that perspective, with new scholarship about the on-the-ground realities of the congressional drafting process - including the essential role that staff plays in that process - and have argued the relevance of those realities for theory and doctrine. Here we go deeper. This article goes beyond our previous accounts of partisan committee staff, congressional counsels, and other select staff offices to introduce the broader concept of what we call the 'congressional bureaucracy'. The congressional bureaucracy is the collection of approximately a dozen nonpartisan offices that, while typically unseen by the public and largely ignored by courts and practicing lawyers, provides the specialized expertise that helps make congressional lawmaking possible. In the process, the bureaucracy furthers Congress's own internal separation of powers and safeguards the legislative process from executive and interest-group encroachment.

\"Effective legal writing calls not only for artistry but also for scientific understanding.\" In this synthesis of his experience on the bench and his own research into the science and art of written communications, Robert E.

All theories of statutory interpretation rely on an idea of how Congress operates. A commonly held supposition among scholars is that the procedures used in the creation of legislation are unsophisticated and almost anarchic. This supposition exists because scholars generally give little consideration to the underlying actors and their evolving roles in the drafting process. This Article deconstructs the many steps of, and actors involved in, the statutory-drafting process. It reveals an evolving process that is the opposite of what scholars generally believe: While Congress historically did not have the capacity or resources to draft statutes well, it has evolved through the last forty years to arrive at a point where modern statutes are carefully researched by professional researchers and clearly drafted by nonpartisan professional legislative drafters, with the entire process overseen by hundreds of specialized committee staff and countless lobbyists. This Article uses this better understanding of the evolution of Congress's institutional competence to explain how the rise of judicial textualism over the last few decades should be viewed at least partially as a response to Congress's improved drafting process. And not only do these practical findings provide a descriptive account of judicial behavior, they also provide a basis from which to make normative judgments about how to undertake statutory interpretation based on the era in which a statute was drafted, a method that this Article terms \"inter-temporal statutory interpretation.\" This Article demonstrates how consideration of the evolution of the real-world legislative process can allow for more fully developed theories of statutory interpretation.

Social work in the US has failed to respond to the largest legislative attack on the rights of transgender and non-binary people in the history of the country. Hundreds of laws have been proposed over the past several years, aiming to ban transgender and non-binary people from public life, as well as criminalising gender-affirming healthcare and attempting to remove transgender youth from supportive families for forced detransition. Beginning with the Trump administration, these bills have exponentially increased in number, now being proposed in more than 60 per cent of the US. This article critically reviews the ways in which national social work organisations have failed to address both the systemic erasure of transgender people in their pedagogy and the behaviours of specific actors within the social work profession who are actively helping to draft anti-trans legislation and advocate for conversion therapy, contravening both the evidence base and code of ethics.

Although legislation has become a central feature of our legal system, relatively little is known about how statutes are drafted, particularly at the state level. This Note addresses this gap by surveying drafting manuals used by bill drafters in state legislatures. These manuals describe state legislatures' bill drafting offices and outline conventions for statutory formatting, grammar, and style. These documents are valuable tools in statutory interpretation as information about drafting offices provides context for analyzing legislative history, and drafting conventions can illuminate statutory meaning. This Note offers normative justifications for using drafting manuals in statutory interpretation as well as principles to guide state courts in considering drafting manuals in their jurisprudence. [web URL: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/state-legislative-drafting-manuals-and-statutory-interpretation]