Sergey Porter / Vedomosti

The low quality of domestic legislation in recent years and the amendment of laws for immediate reasons worries professional lawyers. The ease with which the principles of electoral law, the system of tax collection, pension calculation or traffic rules are changed is caused not only by the peculiarities of the current political management and the deputy corps. Experts explain the possibility of developing hasty laws and their rapid adoption by the lack of regulation of the procedure for adopting laws.

Scientists from the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the Russian Federation have set out rules for developing and adopting high-quality laws and other norms in the draft law "On Regulatory Legal Acts in the Russian Federation". Its authors note that the law must regulate the most significant and stable relations and cannot be changed by departmental norms and instructions. Newly adopted laws cannot contradict already adopted norms; they must be written in such a way as to "ensure unambiguous perception by all interested parties". Laws should reduce evaluative norms (for example, "significant harm" or "contempt of court"), which allow for a broad interpretation when applied.

Legal experts propose to improve the quality of legislation by means of several stages of its purification. Each law or by-law must undergo, in addition to departmental discussion, an independent examination by specialists and expert organizations that did not participate in its preparation and are not subordinate to the authors of the amendment. The experts' feedback and the authors' comments must be attached to the package of documents for further work on it. The next and very important stage of purification is mandatory public discussion, which must last at least 60 days for federal and regional laws and 45 for other legal acts.

Scientists have also proposed a barrier against the dilution of the meaning of law through amendments: they should be introduced and discussed according to the same procedure as laws.

Legal expert Viktor Cherepanov compares the influence of laws with the effect of medicines and suggests adopting amendments only after testing their application in "pilot" regions. Implementation of the scientists' proposals would allow us to weed out a significant portion of raw and illiterate amendments that affect the daily lives of citizens and businesses.

From the editor: How to write laws