In 2017, the United States enacted the largest overhaul of its tax code in a generation. Buried in it was a mistake. Lawmakers created a new concept of “qualified improvement property”, covering interior renovations that businesses were meant to write off over 15 years. Except that is not quite what the law said. Its drafters left out the words supposed to specify the limitation period. As enacted, businesses had to spread the cost over 39 years instead. Retailers and restaurants delayed investment, the Treasury rightly said it could not fix the wording, and the correction took Congress until 2020.

The provision (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2017; corrected by the CARES Act 2020) had been written by some of the most experienced lawyers in the world. The case illustrates the central importance of legislative drafting, and the difficulty of getting it right. Most undergraduate law degree programmes teach students to interpret statutes, but rarely offer courses in legislative drafting, which remains a skill picked up on the job, if at all. The result is a shortage of skilled legislative drafters.

"Not every lawyer is trained to be a draftsperson or qualified to be one… It's a global problem."

Graham Leung
then Attorney-General of Fiji

Drafting Is a Team Effort

The shortage of drafters is compounded by the fact that legislative drafting does not happen at a single point, but at many stages of the law-making process. At each stage, the text can be changed by people who understand the policy but are unfamiliar with how legislation is crafted. Most are not lawyers, and even those who are may not be drafters.

When a parliamentary committee scrutinising a Bill during its passage inserts or deletes a phrase, it can shift the scope of a power or unsettle a definition without intending to. Officials should check such changes with the drafter but, in reality, this step is often missed. Little of the text is examined again between drafting and enactment – partly because of its technical complexity, partly because scrutiny resources are limited – and a well-crafted draft carries a dangerous plausibility that can lull readers into a false sense of security. Weaknesses slip through in both drafting models. Departmental drafts can come from officials untrained in writing laws, while centrally drafted laws may have been developed without the subject-matter expertise to judge whether the text will achieve the policy's objectives.

The reason these small changes can do such damage is that a law is not a list of separate rules but a single, interlocking structure. In this way, we can compare a drafter to an architect. Most people walk through a building without knowing why the foundations sit where they do, how the load-bearing walls support the structure, or why one alteration can affect the stability of the whole. A skilled architect sees the design beneath the surface. A skilled drafter does the same with legislation, understanding that a concept created in one part of a statute must remain coherent with every other part, and with the entire statute book.

Crafting a Legal Section: The Work of Many Hands

Ambiguity Carries a Cost

When that system is not carefully constructed, the consequences can be costly. Ambiguous provisions, imprecise laws, concepts that fail to cohere into a single scheme. Lawyers will read ambiguous wording in whatever way serves their client, and a poorly drafted law can be challenged in court and struck down. Weak drafting also costs time: every ambiguity adds delay, first as rounds of redrafting before a law is passed, then as litigation after it. And it is often citizens and businesses who pay the cost.

A landmark South African case (South African Human Rights Commission v Agro Data CC and Another 2026) shows how high the stakes can be. In 2018, occupiers of the Doornhoek farm in Mpumalanga complained to the South African Human Rights Commission that the owners had restricted their access to borehole water. The Commission found violations of the rights to water and dignity and issued a written directive to compel the owners to restore the supply within seven days. The owners did not comply. The Commission went to court, where the question became whether its directives were legally binding at all.

In April 2026, South Africa’s Constitutional Court held, unanimously, that they were not. Examining the Commission's enabling provisions, the Court found the wording did not show that the drafters had intended to give it the power to issue binding directives. The Commission had operated for years on a power its founding law never clearly conferred. The occupiers of the Doornhoek farm had waited eight years for a remedy that the Commission had no power to enforce.

Improving the Drafting Process

The answer to this uncertainty is stronger drafting capacity across the whole law-making process. A common and costly assumption is that anyone who can write a grammatical sentence in English can draft a law. Reading legislation and creating it are different skills. Legislation works best when a drafter sits close to the policymakers, understands the policy in depth, and builds the right mechanisms into the draft from the start. This is why drafting literacy is needed across the legislative process – from policy leaders and legal advisers in sector departments to members of the legislature.

Since its inception in 2024, the Chandler Institute of Justice (CIJ) has trained more than 150 legislative drafters across Africa. From South Africa to Zambia, Eswatini and Malawi, our flagship Drafting Laws that Matter programme targets people at every stage of the legislative process through practical drafting exercises. CIJ has also developed a Legislative Drafting Guide, a practical reference on the principles of good legislative design.

Building Stable Foundations

The value of strong legislative drafting is practical and lasting. Clearer rights for citizens, greater certainty for businesses, and stronger legal foundations for public policy. Good policies will not guarantee good governance on their own, but clear laws help citizens plan, officials act with confidence and reforms take hold. Strengthening legislative drafting capacity is among the most valuable investments a government can make in the rule of law, and in the prosperity that good law makes possible.