ABSTRACT
The process of repeal may be greatly helped not only if legislation is carefully drafted before enactment but also carefully and systematically reviewed and scrutinised after enactment so as to facilitate repeal or amendment where experience or changing requirements make this necessary or desirable. The Law Commission considered post-legislative scrutiny and suggested that departments should scrutinise the effectiveness of legislation and there should be a new parliamentary joint committee. If government finds an easy way to repeal or to amend legislation it may be tempted to pay less attention to the quality of new primary legislation. A statute may be in effect changed, altered, extended, restricted or repealed by way of judicial construction and interpretation, perhaps robust, forceful, vigorous or radical construction and interpretation, for instance, judicial activism. The Law Commission is statutorily charged to keep the statute book under review and to recommend the repeal of obsolete statutes, which it does in the annual reports.
