ABSTRACT

The process of making legislation more accessible could, on one view, be characterised as making it look less like an exercise in rule making and more like literature By the mid-1980s, 'progressive' members of Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) had already dropped them as part of a general drive to simplify the language of legislation. One might usefully compare the language range of legislation not so much to literature, but to a high-level programming language. So some drafting assignments may involve a significant element of creativity. The Mental Capacity Act (MCA) is about important values a person must be assumed to have capacity unless shown to lack capacity, any act done or decision made for a person who lacks capacity must be done, or made, in the person's best interests, and so on. The basic propositions about human rights are usually the stuff of international conventions or fundamental laws.