ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the lost art of legislation begins in ancient Greece, where Plato devotes his book Laws to a conversation between three men contemplating the foundation of a colony, about the kind of laws that would be right for its future inhabitants. Only Lon Fuller draws attention to the lost art of legislation with his ideas about the internal morality of law in his famous story about a king named Rex, failing in eight ways to make law. And the surprising answer is that it has indeed happened, but that we have mostly forgotten that an art of legislation has been part and parcel of the legal and political traditions of the Western world. The science of economics emancipates itself from the art of legislation which was still very much on the mind of Adam Smith. The general principles of the art of legislation are thus clear.
