Affecting and amending other laws

Most policies deal with matters that have been the subject of one or more previous laws. A new measure must be carefully related to earlier laws to produce, as far as possible, a consistent body of law that will achieve the policy without producing unintended consequences.

Always ask: In what way does the new policy relate to existing law? The answer will have a major effect on how you draft, and you can't be sure of the answer until you have a thorough understanding of the policy and the existing law.

You might even find that the policy is already realized, in whole or in part, by existing law. Or that the lawmaker did not have a full understanding of what existing law is. Every once in a while, you find that the law has already been changed to fit the policy, someone else already achieved it, perhaps so recently that your lawmaker hadn't yet heard.

Then again, you might find that the policy can be achieved only by amending or otherwise affecting existing law. If so, you have some important choices to make about which law to amend (or otherwise affect) and precisely how to do so.

You must decide how best to position the new provisions so that they will have the effect, and the relationship with other laws, that suits the lawmaker's needs. In deciding this, you must consider whether to draft a freestanding law or an amendatory law or, perhaps, a law that contains both freestanding and amendatory provisions.