About this collection

This site collects the legislative drafting guidelines of national legislatures and governments and of supranational and international bodies, and presents each one with structured metadata and, where possible, its full text in HTML. The first phase covers 97 documents from 69 jurisdictions; sub-national guidelines (states, provinces, devolved legislatures) are queued for a later phase.

Metadata recorded for each guideline

Jurisdiction and level

Country or organisation, and whether it is national, supranational (e.g. the EU) or international (e.g. the UN).

Issuing body

The office that publishes the guideline, such as a parliamentary counsel office or ministry of justice.

Legal status

Whether the text is binding (a regulation, statute or government resolution) or guidance.

Edition, first published, last updated

As stated by the issuer. “Continuously updated” marks online guides without editions.

Currency

Current latest edition located, no newer edition found on the issuer's site. In force binding instrument currently in force. Dated still the issuer's reference text but not revised for many years. Superseded replaced by a newer document. Unverified not yet checked against the issuer's site. Each entry records the date currency was checked.

Original format and source

The format the issuer publishes (PDF, HTML, DOCX), the direct source URL and the publisher's page.

Retrieval

Date the stored copy was downloaded, its size and SHA-256 checksum, so changes to the official file can be detected.

Licence

The reuse terms stated by the issuer, where known.

Conversion to HTML

PDF documents are converted by layout analysis: font sizes are ranked to rebuild heading levels, running headers, footers and page numbers are removed, and lines are rejoined into paragraphs and list items. HTML sources are reduced to their main content, and multi-page online guides are combined in their table-of-contents order. Word documents are converted with Pandoc. Conversion errors are possible; the original document is always linked.

Search

Full-text search runs in the browser using a static index generated at build time. The repository also contains an OpenSearch index mapping and bulk-export script for loading the same documents into an OpenSearch cluster.

Sources

Documents were located through the issuers' own websites and the drafting-manual list maintained by the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel. A companion HTML edition of the Commonwealth Legislative Drafting Manual is maintained separately.

Contribute

Please send us guidelines we have missed, newer editions, or corrections.