Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the sixth edition
- Preface to the first edition
- Acknowledgments
- Books, pamphlets, memoranda and articles excerpted
- Table of cases
- 1 Legislation – the Whitehall stage
- 2 Legislation – the Westminster stage
- 3 Statutory interpretation
- 4 Binding precedent – the doctrine of stare decisis
- 5 How precedent works
- 6 Law reporting
- 7 The nature of the judicial role in law-making
- 8 Other sources of law
- 9 The process of law reform
- Index
2 - Legislation – the Westminster stage
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the sixth edition
- Preface to the first edition
- Acknowledgments
- Books, pamphlets, memoranda and articles excerpted
- Table of cases
- 1 Legislation – the Whitehall stage
- 2 Legislation – the Westminster stage
- 3 Statutory interpretation
- 4 Binding precedent – the doctrine of stare decisis
- 5 How precedent works
- 6 Law reporting
- 7 The nature of the judicial role in law-making
- 8 Other sources of law
- 9 The process of law reform
- Index
Summary
The legislative process
Procedure for public bills
The sequence of events in the legislative process from the introduction of a bill to Royal Assent has been described by a senior member of the office of Clerk to the House of Commons, most generously written for the second edition of this book in 1985. (Editorial footnotes introduce more recent developments but comparison of this description against the lengthy Guide to Legislative Procedures issued by the Cabinet Office for the benefit of officials shows that nothing of substance has changed.)
A bill must be given ‘three readings’ in each House before it can be submitted for the Royal Assent. The First Reading is purely formal when the Clerk of the House reads the title from a dummy bill and a day is named for Second Reading. For government bills, the day named is ‘tomorrow’. Although the bill will appear amongst the remaining orders of the day for the next sitting, the government will not move the Second Reading until a later date, which is announced in advance in the weekly business statement and which will be a sufficient time after presentation to give members an opportunity to consider the text.
The debate on Second Reading is the main consideration of the general principles of a bill, at the end of which a vote (though it need not) be taken on the bill as a whole. Although a bill can be lost at many stages in its career, the Second Reading is undoubtedly the most important, and the vast majority of bills which get a Second Reading and proceed into committee also get on to the statute book. […]
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- Information
- The Law-Making Process , pp. 53 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004