Hard copies can be purchased from publisher Toppan Leefung. The new revised edition can be accessed for free at the AGC's Singapore Statutes Online website. "When you have 30 drafters working on the Acts, there are bound to be differences in style and expression." "We had various checklists of standard and non-standard changes, but it is not as straightforward as a direct substitution and every edit needed to be considered in its context," said Ms Lee. "These resources are not online, and the team needed to make multiple visits to various libraries," said Ms Lee, adding that the team also had to ensure consistency in the edits across the Acts. It is timely for the Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC) to be embarking on a revision of 510 of Singapore's Acts (Over 500 Singapore laws to be made simpler to read, Dec 20).
The sheer volume of the work was formidable, she said, as the 2020 revision had 510 Acts, compared with 387 in 1985.Īnother challenge was tracing the legislative history of each Act, especially for older laws and those that had predecessors that had been repealed. "We realised that it would be a pity to lose that by modernising all the laws, so we decided to preserve the language of certain laws so that we keep the 'voice' of past legislation," said Ms Lee.
The team also developed a deeper appreciation of Singapore's legal heritage, which includes British, Indian and Malaysian laws, and those from the Straits Settlements government. "This is probably the single biggest challenge in any revision, because even a comma or a different placement of a word can change the meaning of a provision." The revision team had to be precise in the use of every single word and punctuation, to avoid inadvertently changing the meaning of the law, she said.
0 kommentar(er)
