Role of Law Commission in Reforming the Law
The law commission is a full-time advisory body on the subject of law reform and is made up of a chairman (high court judge) and four commissioners; these are aided in production of Bills by a group of researching support staff and four parliamentary draftsmen who aid in the drafting of the actual proposed bills. The law commission first came into existence in 1965 after the Law commission Act of 1965 was passed by parliament. The main purpose of the law commission is stated in section 3 of the Law Commission Act of 1965, this states the role of the Law commission is in basic terms to ‘Keep all the Law under Review and recommend reform when it is needed’.

Parliament create the law and enable reforms to occur, the law commission has no power to reform the law, there job is merely to recommend reforms to consolidate, modernise, simplify and improve the law with the help of experts and months of research on the subject at hand, something parliament would not have the time to do which creates the need for the law commission. These Recommendations are first presented to parliament as a consolidation paper and then a firm proposal of reform is presented. This is then either passed by parliament to reform law or denied and sent back to the law commission for further reviewing. An example of a passed reform is the (Year and a day rule act) 1996 in which the law commission succeeded in obtaining a reform in the law, on the other hand the commission can fail to achieve reform from parliament.

The law commission’s job can be separated into two parts, which are consolidation and codification. Consolidation consists of gathering past statues of the same law principles and consolidating them into one consolidation bill. Five consolidation bills are produced each year, though on occasions these bills contradict and are overruled with new Acts of Parliament, this decreases the successes rate of the law commission. For example a newly consolidated Powers of criminal Court (sentencing) Act 2000 was altered a few months later by Criminal Justice and court service act 2000 The second occupation of the law commission is codification which is the coding of the law for easy accessibility and understanding for the general public and law related groups.

The original ideas of codification have yet to be fully achieved by the law commission. The criminal code situation is a mayor example of unsuccessful ventures for the law commission in 1985 a draft criminal code was published, this covered 90-95% of the criminal courts work. When laid before parliament but wasn’t even consider because of the size and amount of time of parliament, so the code was separated into small manageable sections, but again parliament failed to consider the proposal. The area of law is still in awaiting reform even to the present day.

The commission proved to be quite successful in the first 10 years of its creation as 85% of the law commission’s proposal were passed although the success of the law commission has differed over the years from its date of creation to the present day. The first 20 law reform proposals were enacted in an average of just two years by parliament, an example is the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and Occupiers’ liability Act 1984. In the next ten years of the commissions existence only 50% of the reform proposals were enacted by parliament, in 1990 this got worse when not one of reform proposals were passed in the entire year by parliament, its success had plummeted. The problem lead to the creation of the Jellicoe procedure in 1994, which used the special public bills committee of the House of Lords to debate non-controversial bills , this speeded up the number of suggested reforms by the law commission and between December 1994 to 1995 13 proposals became law. The use though of this procedure has declined over the years, decreasing the success of the commission.

The law commission is a full time adversary body on the subject of law reform that was created in 1965 by the Law commission Act of 1965, its role is to review and propose reforms, and the job of the commission can be separated into two parts, codification and consolidation. In the first ten years of its existence the law commission proved to be successful although in the later years of its existence its success rate declined up until the Jellicoe procedure that rekindled the success of the commission, though lately the procedures use has declined. Overall the commission have proved to be quite successful although with no parliamentary issues that use up valuable time the success rate has fallen.

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