Kirjahaku

Born in 1939 into a secular Jewish family and educated in the public school system, the author decided after some years to abandon a career intended for him in the family furniture business and qualify as a barrister. At school he had dreamt about travel to Africa, and subsequently during National Service was commissioned and seconded to Northern Nigeria. The African connection continued when he later spent ten years as a government lawyer in Malawi and then Kenya. Subsequently, as a legal consultant, he travelled extensively in the Commonwealth, an institution in whose legacies he firmly believes. In the 1960s he became interested in Israel, especially after he and his wife spent periods of time there, including 4 months in a kibbutz at the time of the Six Day War. In that decade he also travelled widely in the United States. This autobiography relates the richness of, and the many adventures undertaken during, these and many other life experiences.

In 1976, recognising that there was a shortage of trained legislative drafters in the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth Secretariat first published a legislative drafting manual aimed at informing those practitioners with little or no previous experience in the skill, and assisting those with some experience who had never considered why drafting needed to be undertaken in a particular way.That aim remains, but more than 40 years later there have been important changes in the way legislation is drafted. These mainly concern the perceived need to make it more accessible to those to be affected by it, in particular by the use of plain language and sentence structures that relate more closely to those used in formal nonlegislative documents.In the light of these and other changes, the Commonwealth Legislative Drafting Manual has been completely rewritten, and it now guides the practitioner step by step through the various things he or she needs to know. It also contains a series of appendices relating to the procedure for the preparation of legislation, the contents of drafting instructions, and some hints to the beginner on the best approaches to the task.