Making laws that work

How laws fail and how we can do better

Law-making is remarkably difficult. An obvious example is the justice secretary’s lonely ambition to repeal and replace the Human Rights Act 1998. In October 2021, The Times reported Dominic Raab’s aim to have “new human rights legislation on the statute book by the end of next year” — in other words, by tomorrow.

As I said at the time, this seemed wildl…