The Power to Govern, the Duty to Account
CENTS Governance Academy

Executive & Specialist Programmes

Fiscal Law: Interpretation and Legislative Drafting

A provision rarely fails because it was badly drafted. It fails because the instruction behind it misread the economics or the behaviour. We teach the context that lets a drafter interrogate the instruction before the loophole is enacted.

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Programme overview

A provision rarely fails because it was badly drafted. It fails because the instruction behind it misread the economics or the behaviour. We teach the context that lets a drafter interrogate the instruction before the loophole is enacted.

This specialised subject can be taken as a one-day working lab, three-day workshop, two-week specialised training, or curated institutional programme within published open windows.

Who should attend

Legislative drafters and parliamentary counsel, law reform commissions, tax policy and legal units, committee legal advisers.

Programme modules

Module spine

  1. 01

    Why provisions fail: post-legislative diagnosis of enacted law and the point at which it broke

  2. 02

    Anti-avoidance architecture: specific rules, the general rule, and how courts have treated each

  3. 03

    Drafting against the schemes already in circulation, and anticipating those that follow

  4. 04

    The treaty interface and the boundary between primary and delegated legislation

  5. 05

    Costing a bill: revenue estimation, compliance burden and regulatory impact assessment

  6. 06

    Capstone: a bill drafted, loophole-tested by a rival team and defended against a taxpayer’s bar

Learn from practitioners

Specialist lead