CHAPTER XV EXPEDIENTS FOR IMPROVING THE FORM OF BILLS As problems of administration become complex, legislatures find it impossible to prescribe all the details of law. The power to make the finer adjustments must be delegated to some other authority. The pressure of a large number of bills for consideration has of itself increased the difficulty of securing passage for long and detailed measures. The legislative fortune of a measure is to a large degree bright in inverse ratio to its length. The advocate of a new law will prefer to avoid a long bill both from the desire to make the law flexible and because every added clause increases the opportunity for debate and obstruction. One of the most striking characteristics of recent legislation is the development toward the delegation of powers. Commissions are given control over fields in which the legislature would have formerly resented the exercise of any power except by itself, and the authority to prescribe rules to supplement the law has been increasingly entrusted to administrative officials. Situations more complicated than legislatures have ever before dealt with have brought also the use of various expedients to make the law as printed simpler than would be the case if each detail had to be repeated each time it was touched by the force of the act. Some of the more important means by which these ends are reached are here discussed. The Schedule This expedient has now developed into two forms, one fulfilling the former meaning of the word, an enumeration of details not touching the policy of the law, and the second an expedient to avoid definitions and the necessity of repeating series of words defining the scope of a law. A popular use of the schedule of the first sort is for temporary parts of acts to supply the rules which are to govern during the period before a law can come into full effect, as for example in laws concerning changes in the terms of public officers. A schedule may be introduced to insure that the new law shall not disturb the terms of the officers already elected or it may regulate the conditions under which they shall surrender control to their successors. Similar are the schedules often attached to constitutional amendments setting out the conditions under which they shall be submitted to popular vote for ratification. Expedients of this sort are favored because the temporary provisions, being grouped together, are readily eliminated after they have served their purpose and thus make it easy to consolidate the substantive part of the law. Care should be taken that in schedules of this sort nothing which is intended to be a permanent rule should be inserted. To be sure, the generally accepted rule, still followed without exception in England, is that “a schedule is as much a part of an act as the sections by which it is preceded."1 Consequently the permanent provisions, where this rule is adhered to, would not fall. But the disadvantage of mixing temporary and permanent 1 Attorney-General v. Lamplugh (1878), 3 Ex. D. 229. Quoted by Ilbert, Legislative Methods and Forms, p. 268. rules is evident. Further, it has been held in Ohio that a clause apparently permanent will fall with the temporary provisions if it is included in the schedule attached to a new constitution.1 The line between what should and what should not go into a schedule under this rule is not always easy to draw, but the principle is clear. The second sort of schedule is a substantive part of the act. By the adoption of this expedient a single word may be selected which throughout the act will stand for a series of words enumerated only once - in the schedule. To some extent the schedule is subject to the objections elsewhere given to the use of definitions, for when a single word is held to stand in the act for a series it amounts to almost the same thing as defining the single word to mean the terms in the series. A better practice is to refer to the series not by what may be called the index word of the schedule but by citing the schedule itself. Thus a law regulating the sale of drugs may divide the list of drugs into schedules by name and the law may thereafter refer to the schedules without citing any particular drug, thus avoiding the objections to the use of definitions.2 The use of this expedient will often materially shorten and make more perspicuous an act which would otherwise appear complicated and difficult to understand. A frequent use of the schedule in England is in the listing of repeals. Where many acts or parts of acts are affected a carefully drawn schedule of repeals will aid much in keeping the law simple. Care should be taken that the body of the act and the 1 State ex rel. Att'y-Gen. v. Taylor, 15 Ohio St. 137 (1864). 2 For an example of the extended use of tabulation and schedules, see The Pharmacy Act, Laws of New York, 1910, ch. 422, p. 764. |