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Law, Development, and Legislative Drafting in English-Speaking Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
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Legislation in the former British colonial territories exhibited a pair of paradoxes. First, it spoke in legalese, a patois that only judges and lawyers can read easily. Many laws concerning development, however, addressed ordinary citizens. Second, drafters invented and used a specialised style to reduce official and judicial discretion by making legislation more precise, but this frequently endowed officials with discretion as broad as the unbroken sky. In Africa, the uses of legalese seemed to war with the purposes for which it was developed.
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References
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page 160 note 2 For example, Massachusetts 1977 Session Laws., ch. 801.
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