The aim of this article is to describe the mechanism of codification in a civil law jurisdiction. The case study will be based on the Italian system. The history and developments of the Italian codification will also be described here.
In Italy codification is called riassetto, it is normally carried out by the government but the changes to existing law must be within the strict boundaries of the principles and criteria set out by the parliament. By contrast, the mechanism to amalgamate existing texts dealing with a single topic without radical changes is called consolidamento. It is carried out by the government as delegated by parliament. However, as the tools to carry out riassetto and consolidamento are the same (decreto legislativo: a decree issued by the government, which is delegated by the parliament), it is not always easy to understand when the government is allowed to carry out consolidamento only or riassetto too. Actually, how fundamentally the government is allowed to change existing legislation depends on what the principles and criteria of the enabling Act of Parliament allows.
A decreto legislativo that is not in compliance with the principles and criteria established by the Act of Parliament, could be declared void by the Corte costituzionale (the Italian Constitutional Court). Therefore, if the government exceeds the boundaries of consolidamento or riassetto, the decreto legislativo could be declared void.
This essay will also focus on the different drafting techniques of consolidamento and riassetto from a theoretical perspective and from the point of view of the jurisprudence of the Consiglio di Stato and the Corte costituzionale. Finally, it will look at the drafting process for codes in Italy, underlying the differences with systems where law reform agencies have been established.

The Law Commission of England and Wales is currently working to produce a New Sentencing Code that will seek to remedy problems with one of the most heavily used and unsatisfactory areas of statutory law. It responds to the problems of complexity and inaccessibility in the current sentencing legislation, and more fundamentally in the process by which sentencing legislation is created and implemented. The aim is to introduce the new Code as a consolidation Bill in 2018 with a view to it being in force from early 2019. This article provides an overview of the problems endemic to the current law and how the Commission envisages that the new Sentencing Code will provide not only a remedy, but a lasting one.
It is important to understand from the outset that the scope of the Commission’s work on sentencing is to reform procedure. The project and the resulting legislation will not alter the length or level of sentence imposed in any case. The penalties available to the court in relation to an offence are not within the scope of the project and will not change. The change will be in the process by which each sentence is arrived at.

The partner states in the East African Community (EAC) have modernized their commercial laws to claim their post-colonial identity and facilitate development. While law reform and the harmonization of laws are both methods of shaping laws, the national law reform programmes in the EAC mainly aim to ensure that the laws reflect the domestic socioeconomic circumstances, in contrast to the harmonization of national commercial laws, which focuses on the attainment of economic development. This article observes that the reformed and harmonized commercial laws in the EAC are mainly legal transplants of the principles of transnational commercial law that have been adapted to meet domestic needs and aspirations.

Droit Administratif in France is a separate branch of law that exists in parallel to the civil and criminal law. The law has been developed from the concept of separation of powers that is ingrained in the French constitution. Its concepts derive from the Code civil that is implemented in France since its inception in the Napoleonic era and this has undergone reform that has made the role of the judges more interventionist. The highest administrative court is the Conseil d’État, which is at the apex of the machinery of administrative courts that are an important part of public law’s discourse and there is a hierarchy of courts that consider appeals and regulate the norms of conduct of state officials towards the citizens. The judges receive induction and training before taking on the role of occupation and that has been inculcated in the French administrative court judges. This article looks at the separate system of administrative law and its success in preserving the necessary checks and balances in the constitution, which it is intended to protect. This is an examination of the developing concept of French justice, the doctrine of separation of powers and civil procedural changes that enable the grievance of citizens against officials to be heard more expeditiously.

This article discusses the role of non-legal considerations in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. First, it considers what legal instruments are available to the Court in interpreting the Convention Rights and why such instruments came to being in the first place. Second, the article identifies what types of non-legal considerations are taken into account by the Court and what impact they have on the Court’s decision-making process. The article argues that the Court pays considerable attention to such considerations and, in certain circumstances, it deploys available legal instruments, such as the margin of appreciation doctrine or fair balance test, to give those non-legal considerations a legal pretence. The article concludes that the importance of the non-legal factors in the decision-making process can be attributed to the vulnerable position of the European Court of Human Rights vis-à-vis the contracting states.

The 2015 Better Regulation Communication advocates an evidence-based approach to regulation, which includes better consultations and broader civic engagement. In this article, I consider the recent EU public consultation on the regulatory environment of online platforms and the collaborative economy. I enquire in this context whether citizens were seriously regarded as evidence providers and how their knowledge that materialized in individual narratives could contribute to more legitimate and thus better regulation. I argue that an evidence-based approach to regulation should also include citizen narratives as they can provide first-hand and diverse perspectives, which might not be considered in standard consultation questions. I contend that citizen narratives can be particularly useful in complex and rapidly evolving fields where there is still little empirical evidence and where participants are likely to have diverse personal experiences. Drawing on the literature on narratives, I contend that this method of collecting information can help regulators identify new problems and structure solutions in rapidly changing and diverse regulatory fields such as the collaborative economy.