The outcomes of laws need to be analysed before enactment
Legislation and policies in the country are often passed with inadequate scrutiny and assessment. Increasingly, the ‘rush towards law’ results in policies and legal frameworks that are mostly reactive and seek to offer quick-fix solutions to complex problems. As a result, both law-makers and citizens are frequently blindsided by the unanticipated impact of these moves and the laws often run aground on issues of implementation.
Ultimately, the time and effort it takes to undo and resolve the issues caused by such hasty law-making can compound the problem that the law was intended to resolve, making the entire exercise of ‘fixing’ the issue futile. One only has to look at the recent Aadhaar judgment to realise that laws create facts on the ground that are neither easy nor inexpensive to reverse, if at all it is even possible to do so.
This gives rise to a question: what is the function of law in a society? There are good reasons to believe that at a minimum, legislation seeks to create a framework that helps coordinate certain governance processes or to resolve certain identified problems. It also articulates a standard of morality and an ethical approach that a society and government deems appropriate.
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