8.6 What format should your law reform submission take?
Real-world law reform submissions take a variety of forms partly because they are not a formal legal document (compared with, say, a lawyer’s memorandum of advice) or a standard academic task (such as an essay). It is also partly because anyone is free to make a submission to a law reform body or the government. That does not mean that every submission is equally effective. Many are weak documents indeed if we assess them in terms of whether they are taken seriously by their audience.
The best advice is to learn from actual examples, rather than follow them. Many law reform commissions and committees make publicly available copies of the submissions they receive. As a rule of thumb, be more inclined to learn from the examples of leading legal stakeholder groups, such as the Federation of Community Legal Centres, the Victorian Bar, the Law Institute of Victoria and the Law Council of Australia. Also, lobby groups such as Liberty Victoria often make valuable and useful submissions.
TIP: LEARN FROM GOOD EXAMPLES
Most law reform submissions are publicly available and you can access examples with relative ease. Have a look at the different types of submissions and decide which ones you think are most effective and compelling. Pay attention to why that is and emulate that in your work (as long as you still abide by the specific assessment instructions).
While there is no standard or official format for law reform submissions, the following generic format will be helpful for students who have not written a law reform submission before.
GENERIC FORMAT FOR LAW REFORM SUBMISSIONS
- Introduction: State the purpose of your submission clearly and concisely. If your submission is in response to a call for submissions in relation to a law reform inquiry, make this clear. In your introduction, briefly summarise what you are recommending.
- Background: This should include identifying the relevant issues and why they are important. You might summarise the problems, as you see them, with the current situation in the law. It may be useful to provide some history of the relevant law or its problems, if this sheds light on the current problems. Your research will be important in this section.
- Recommendation(s): State fully what it is that you are recommending and set out reasons why things should be changed or, if you are defending the status quo, why things should not change. Be direct and clear about your recommendation(s) and your reasons for them. If it is not clear what your submission is actually recommending, or why that recommendation should be accepted, then its impact will be greatly weakened. Present positive arguments in support of your position clearly and rationally. It will usually also be useful to consider arguments against your position and to make clear why they are not persuasive. As in the background section, your research should provide support for your arguments here. It may be useful to use subheadings in this part.
- Conclusion: Very briefly conclude with a restatement of what it is you want your audience to do.
This generic format can be adapted and revised for particular cases. Whichever format you use, aim for clarity. You want your reader to know right from the start what your document is doing and how each part serves that task. Be clear about what specific issues you are addressing, what your recommendations are on those issues and what your arguments are for your recommended positions. Your structure should reflect these different subtasks of your submission
