Conference Presentations and Panels

Ricardo Bates-Sealy is an Attorney-at-Law and State Counsel at the Law Reform Commission within the Office of the Attorney General of Barbados, where he works on legislative drafting, law reform, and legal policy. He contributed to the Draft Legal Profession Bill 2025, as well as other reform initiatives including criminal justice reform and the modernisation of criminal records rehabilitation legislation. He holds an LL.B. with First Class Honours from the University of the West Indies, where he studied Legislative Drafting and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Cave Hill Student Law Review. He completed the Legal Education Certificate at the Hugh Wooding Law School. He previously served as a Judicial Intern at the Caribbean Court of Justice, which issued the 2025 Practice Direction on Generative AI discussed in his paper.

Artificial intelligence is already present in Caribbean courtrooms, while the frameworks governing its use are proliferating more rapidly than legislation. This paper uses Barbados’s Draft Legal Profession Bill 2025 as a case study to examine how a small Commonwealth jurisdiction can regulate a profession being disrupted by AI in real time. Drawing on three Caribbean practice directions issued in 2025, regional disciplinary incidents in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas, and international case law, the paper argues that technology neutral, principles based drafting, supported by a layered ethics framework and the doctrine of constructive knowledge, offers a more durable regulatory approach than codifying AI in statute. Legislation and court rules are complementary rather than competing: the Act provides the enforcement backbone, while court rules deliver the immediate operational response.

Ms. Heidi-Marie Boakye has been a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Ghana since 2007.  She has since worked as a legislative drafter at the Legislative Drafting Division of the Office of the Attorney-General and Ministry of Justice of Ghana and is currently a Principal State Attorney.

She has been a Part-Time Lecturer in Legislative Drafting at the Ghana School of Law and a Guest Lecturer in Legislative Drafting at the International Law Institute in Kampala, Uganda.  She is an Instructor of the Graduate Diploma Programme in Legislative Drafting at Athabasca University, Canada.

She holds a BA in French and Spanish and an MBA in Marketing, both from the University of Ghana.  She also holds a Certificate in Law Reform from Public Administration International, London and an LLM in Advanced Legislative Studies from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.

The paper examines the legal framework that governs the professional ethics of legislative drafters in Ghana with particular emphasis on those employed by the Executive arm of Government.  In Ghana, legislative drafters who work at the Office of the Attorney-General and Ministry of Justice draft both substantive and subsidiary legislation. Although there are no professional ethics which specifically refer to legislative drafters in the performance of their role, the paper examines the professional ethics which govern them as public sector lawyers who are members of the Legal Service and that which govern them as members of the legal profession.

Byron is an Assistant Parliamentary Counsel in the NSW Parliamentary Counsel’s Office. His background prior to legislative drafting includes drafting Australian Standards and teaching academic philosophy.

In this paper I consider issues with the interpretation and enforcement of Australian Standards (Standards) in New South Wales (NSW). Although I focus on the NSW jurisdiction, some of my conclusions are general.

I ask four related questions –

1. How are Standards produced and used?

2. What is the place and role of Standards in NSW legislation?

3. What legal issues arise in connection with Standards?

4. Is there scope for improvement of how Standards are produced and used?

For (1), I consider how the production of Standards compares with the production of legislation, including the role of committees and drafting rules. For (2), I focus on NSW civil and criminal penalty provisions that refer to Standards. This leads in (3) to a consideration of what legal issues arise for the interpretation and enforcement of Standards. For (4), I consider my responses to (1) – (3) in light of the role and value of quasi-legislation more generally.

Ben Fraser is a Senior Assistant Parliamentary Counsel at the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office of Western Australia. He started working as a drafter in the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel in 2011; he has worked in Western Australia since 2017. He completed a Master of Public and International Law at the University of Melbourne. He has written articles published in the Loophole in 2019 and in the Public Law Review in 2020. He presented at CALC Conferences and Regional Conferences in 2019, 2022, 2023 and in 2025. He also presented at the Pacific Island Law Officer’s Network Legislative Drafter’s Conference in 2025. He has been the CALC Australasia/Pacific representative since 2024.

Drafting clear and easy-to-understand offences is at the heart of a drafter’s work. One of the questions that a provision creating an offence should answer is who bears the burden of proof. The golden thread of the common law is that the prosecution bears the burden, subject to “statutory exception” (and the presumption of sanity): Woolmington v Director of Public Prosecutions [1935] AC 462, 481. The rule is codified in many CALC jurisdictions, including the Evidence Act 1893 (Singapore).

This presentation explores the law of statutory exceptions to offences. The presentation discusses the difficulties Australian courts have had in trying to ascertain whether a provision is part of the offence or a statutory exception to it.

The presentation also sets out practical drafting techniques on how to make it clear that a provision is an exception that reverses the legal burden of proof. It will also set out ways to reverse the evidential burden only, and, crucially, how to make it clear that a provision does not reverse the legal or evidential burden.

Manfred Kohler is the founder of the Regulatory Institute (www.howtoregulate.org), an independent consultant for law-making and member of the CALC artificial intelligence working group. He has spent most of his career at the European Commission, mainly by revising over 100 UNECE regulations on motor vehicles, the EU law on medical devices and on construction products. Via internal consultations and as internal consultant, he has contributed to dozens of other pieces of EU legislation. In parallel to his assignments, he inventoried the regulatory techniques used in EU legislation and worldwide. From late 2010 to early 2014, he trained over 300 colleagues in regulatory techniques. Manfred also developed a working method for legislative drafters and lawmakers, laid down in the Handbook “How to Regulate?”. He developed, drafted or contributed to most of the tools and articles accessible at www.howtoregulate.org. Since 2023, he also regularly contributes methodological papers to CALC conferences and The Loophole.

Regulating as a Global Activity – State of Play and Trends

This presentation aims to provide a global overview of our shared enterprise — the establishment of regulation. The presentation covers the following: the evolution of subject matters; the selection of subject matters; the volume, length and granularity of regulatory instruments; the number of policy and regulatory elements contained within them; drafting and elaboration methods; knowledge bases; and the cultural and jurisdictional influence zones that shape regulatory practice. The presentation concludes by identifying areas where the rationality and coherence of our common regulatory enterprise might be enhanced.

Covering Diverse Technologies by a Single Legislative Instrument

New technologies, products and services continue to emerge at pace, and are becoming increasingly complex. At the same time, the legislative and implementation capacities of states remain constrained: resources are under pressure. To address this mismatch, jurisdictions may wish to consider adopting a single legislative instrument that covers a broad range of technologies — and the products or services derived from them. This presentation demonstrates how such an approach can be achieved by a good architecture, a clear understanding of risks and their assessment methodologies, risk classification, the outsourcing of conformity assessment functions and more.

Charles Lim Aeng Cheng is currently the Principal Senior State Counsel of the Legislation Division of the Attorney-General’s Chambers and a Law Revision Commissioner. He was the Parliamentary Counsel in charge of the legislative drafting and law reform divisions and the Chief Knowledge Officer.

Charles served on the Advisory Council on Impact of New Media on Society, the National Internet Advisory Committee and the Commonwealth Expert Working Group on Legal Aspects of IT and the Related Law of Evidence (London, 2000 and 2002). He co-chaired the Singapore Academy of Law’s (“Academy”) Sub-Committee on the Legal Implications of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He is also a Vice-Chair of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Bioethics Committee.

Charles read law at Cambridge University (1976-1979). He was awarded the IT Leader Award by the Singapore Computer Society in 1999 for contributions to the legislative framework for E-Commerce. The Academy conferred on him its Merit Award (2008) and Singapore Law Award (2024) for contributions to the development of Singapore Law.

This paper shares some pointers and suggested approaches to the drafting of new and innovative laws relating to transformative technology (e.g. AI and Crypto) and social media in regulatory and civil and criminal liability contexts. How can drafters help balance the constitutional principle of freedom of expression on one hand and the interests of individual victims and the public on the other?  How do legislative drafting techniques of “technology neutrality” and “future-proofing” work in the face of agentic AI, deepfakes, cancel culture and driverless vehicles? What can drafters do when AI disrupts traditional concepts of liability and fault attribution? Are court processes and remedies still relevant in social media where trollers are anonymous and viral? Can leveraging “cyber-architecture” be the solution to protection from cross-border cyber harms and scams? Illustrations will be drawn from recent legislation in Singapore as well as leading Commonwealth jurisdictions.

Lucy Marsh-Smith is a UK-trained lawyer who started her career in the UK Government Legal Service. Her move to Jersey in 1996 led to a career in legislative drafting. She later moved into management, leading the Isle of Man drafting team 2008-13 and the Jersey Office since 2018. Lucy enjoys mentoring and teaching drafters and runs courses for the Civil Service College in London as well as acting as a tutor for the graduate diploma in legislative drafting at Athabasca University. She has a master’s degree in public law from London University and one in Jersey law from the Institute of Law in Jersey. She was a Council Member of CALC for the Europe Region for more than a decade.

Having just celebrated 30 years since first coming to Jersey as a drafter, Lucy Marsh-Smith, who has headed the drafting office for over 8 years, looks back on the seismic changes in the way Jersey produces and publishes its legislation. Her presentation will touch on:

• Drafting style: how we keep up with plain English.

• Recruiting an editorial team and trainee drafters.

• Setting standards: how we look to raise the quality of our drafting and train our instructing officers.

• Law Revision and consolidation: from annual updates to point in time.

• Our evolving drafting template, other developing technologies and the Computer-Readable Legislation Project.

Over the course of a long career, Eamonn has worked as a legislative counsel, as a solicitor, as a barrister, as a law reform commissioner, as an instructor in legislative drafting, as a member of various ministerial advisory committees and, from January 2018 to January 2025, as the head of the then Victorian Inspectorate (now called Integrity Oversight Victoria), a body that oversees Victoria’s anti-corruption body as well as other integrity entities.

He was Chief Parliamentary Counsel in Victoria between 1999 and 2008 and from then until June 2012 was Law Draftsman in Hong Kong. Eamonn received a Public Service Medal in Australia in 2005 for service to legislative drafting and public law and the promotion of plain legal language and in 2012 was awarded by the Hong Kong government a Silver Bauhinia Star (SBS) for dedicated service in law drafting in Hong Kong and his contribution to the development of plain language drafting in Hong Kong.

Eamonn is co-author of Modern Statutory Interpretation: Framework, Principles and Practice published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.

Eamonn was appointed Queen’s Counsel (now King’s Counsel) in Victoria, Australia in 1998.

He was President of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel from 2007-2011 and President of Clarity International from 2016-2018.

In this paper Eamonn Moran discusses the important role delegation provisions play in public administration, looks at how Interpretation legislation can support their drafting and canvasses an issue about the scope of delegations that potentially might cause decision-making by delegates to be challenged.

Dr. Kiratipong Naewmalee serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), where his work centers on advancing legal development and reform. His expertise spans regulatory modernization, public governance, and institutional reform, reflected in his published research and advisory roles. He also holds judicial appointment as an Associated Judge at the Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court of Thailand, and contributes to national policy as a member of the Subcommittee for the Office of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission of Thailand, as well as the Fast Track Regulatory Reform for the Capital Market.

A recognized advocate of legal modernization, Dr. Naewmalee is frequently invited to lecture at leading Thai universities and to provide expert commentary on regulatory reform and governance. He earned his Ph.D. in Law from the University of Wollongong, Australia, an LL.M. in International Investment Law from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and an LL.B. from Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand.

Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) has emerged as an essential instrument of evidence-based policymaking, ensuring that laws are not only well-intentioned but also practical, economically efficient, and socially accountable. Without RIA, legislative processes risk producing regulations disconnected from economic realities, imposing unnecessary burdens on businesses and citizens, and eroding public trust. Recognizing these risks, Thailand constitutionalized RIA under Section 77 of the 2017 Constitution and further formalized the requirement through the 2019 Act on Legislative Drafting and Evaluation of Law, mandating impact analysis and public consultation prior to the enactment of both primary legislation and subordinate regulations.

This article examines Thailand’s RIA framework in comparative perspective with three high-performing Commonwealth jurisdictions — the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada — all of which score above the OECD average in RIA quality, oversight, and transparency. The comparative analysis covers six key dimensions: legal basis, scope, methodology, consultation, transparency, and oversight bodies.

The findings indicate that Thailand’s constitutional foundation is robust and its institutional framework broadly consistent with OECD principles. However, some gaps remain in analytical rigor, oversight capacity, consultation depth, and the disproportionate ex ante review framework, which imposes costs incommensurate with regulatory impacts. Some key lessons emerge from international practice: adopting Australia’s tiered quality-rating system and mandatory cost quantification; strengthening independent scrutiny of options and impact assessments through a body modeled on the UK’s Regulatory Policy Committee, supported by threshold-based triggers to concentrate resources on high-impact regulations; and incorporating Canada’s inclusive Gender-Based Analysis Plus framework alongside extended consultation periods. Addressing these shortcomings would significantly enhance Thailand’s evidence-based regulatory governance and overall efficiency.

The Hon. Anthony North KC

The Chairperson of the VLRC is the Hon Tony North KC. Mr North is a former judge of the Federal Court and the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory. Admitted to the Victorian Bar in 1976, he was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1989. In 1995, Mr North was made judge of the Federal Court of Australia, where he served until his retirement in 2018. He also served, from 2004, as additional judge of the Supreme Court of the ACT. During his time as judge, Mr North presided over cases involving constitutional and commercial law, industrial and employment law, taxation, intellectual property and native title. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws with Honours from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Laws from the University of London. In January 2024 Mr North was appointed a Commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission and took leave from the VLRC to fulfil that role until March 2025. He was appointed President of the Commo nwealth Association of Law Reform Agencies in 2025.

Matthew Jolley

Matthew Jolley qualified as a solicitor in 1998 at Linklaters, London, where he worked as a Managing Associate specialising in trusts, charities and private client law. He joined the Law Commission of England and Wales in 2003 as Manager of the Property, Family and Trusts team. He worked on trust law reform before leading the team’s projects on a wide range of areas including cohabitation, intestacy and wills, land registration, weddings, charities, residential leases and financial remedies on divorce. Since 2019 he has acted as Head of Legal at the Commission, working with the Chair, CEOs and Commissioners on a range of strategic issues, and is responsible for the Commission’s international engagement. He sits as a judge in the Mental Health Tribunal.

Professor Penney Lewis

Professor Penney Lewis joined the Law Commission of England and Wales as Commissioner for Criminal Law in 2020. Since arriving at the Commission, she has completed projects on the Protection of Official Data, Search Warrants, Misconduct in Public Office, Modernising Communications Offences, Hate Crime, Corporate Criminal Liability, Confiscation of the Proceeds of Crime, Intimate Image Abuse and Evidence in Sexual Offences Prosecutions. Recommendations from four of those projects have been recently implemented by Parliament; recommendations from six of them are currently before Parliament. Her current projects include Criminal Appeals, Contempt of Court and Homicide. She is also a Member of the Home Office’s Science and Technology Ethics Advisory Committee.

Previously she was Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics in the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London and a Member of the Human Tissue Authority.

The speakers in this presentation are from the Commonwealth Association of Law Reform Agencies.

The Commonwealth Association of Law Reform Agencies represents law reformers from around the world and is holding its conference in Singapore directly before the CALC conference. This presentation will explore the role of legislative drafting in law reform. In some jurisdictions, law reform agencies work with drafters during the course of reform projects, publishing draft legislation alongside recommendations for reform. Other agencies take a different approach, focusing on solely on recommendations for reform and leaving it to Government to produce legislation when implementing those recommendations. The presentation will explain, and explore the merits of, each of these approaches.

Raised in Northern Ireland, Genevieve read law at Trinity College Dublin and the London School of Economics. She was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2006 and practised as a barrister in London for 13 years, latterly, as a member of the Attorney General’s Panel, representing various UK Government departments in a range of civil litigation. Having married a Scot and moved to Edinburgh, she became a drafter in 2019 when she joined the Scottish Government’s Office of Parliamentary Counsel, where she has remained since. She qualified as a solicitor in Scotland in 2025. She has been involved in teaching law at Queens University Belfast, the London School of Economics and Edinburgh University. In addition to her drafting work, she delivers training on statutory interpretation and runs her office’s exchange programmes with other UK and Irish drafting offices.

As misogyny surges in public discourse, especially online, calls for a legislative response grow, but drafting such legislation is challenging. In the context of the recent UN Women report on the escalation of online violence against women in the public sphere, this presentation will outline possible models for criminalising misogyny, referring to real world examples, including the Singaporean Harassment Court, the Online Criminal Harms Act 2023 and the recent Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act 2025. It will consider the challenges in drafting to criminalise misogyny including issues around the meaning of “sex” and “gender”.

Ross specialises in statutory interpretation (including comparative statutory interpretation) at the University of Western Ontario. His thesis maps the current approach to statutory interpretation in the UK, including the nature of bilingual interpretation in Wales. In Edinburgh, he analysed the interpretation and operation of Brexit legislation. Additionally, Ross retains an interest in tax law (specifically tax avoidance and interpretation) and the conflict of laws. Ross held visiting posts at the University of Cambridge, Yong Pung How School of Law (Singapore Management University), and the National University of Singapore. Ross is also appointed as the UK national report for European Collaborations on the conflict of laws and tax interpretation.

Legislation has to deal with all sorts of eventualities. Often, a statute, potentially of high vintage, is invoked in uncontemplated situations. Examples include technological developments, conflicting statutes, and the invocation of forum statutes in a conflict of laws context. From the UK case law, an a priori classification does not seem relevant. Rather, the approach is the normal purposive approach. This presentation discusses how the UK courts have relied on a statute’s text, context, and purpose to resolve examples of uncontemplated scenarios, such as technological developments, conflicting statutes, and the use of statutes in the choice of law context.

Mason Stott is a lawyer with the Province of Saskatchewan's Ministry of Justice's Legislative Drafting Branch, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He obtained his Juris Doctor (2019), LLM (2022), and Bachelor of Commerce (2015) from the University of Saskatchewan, and his Master of Public Policy from the University of Calgary (2016).

Orbital rocketry is a type of economic, engineering, and scientific activity that is new to many countries and there are uncertainties about how to properly legislate and regulate in this area. In this presentation, Mason Stott will review the comparative analyses he undertook as part of his LLM thesis, wherein he investigated the United Nations five multilateral space law treaties from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as foreign legislative schemes from multiple countries, and other space-related legislation from Canada, to gain valuable ideas on how to legislate in this area. His reviews provide solid foundational content that any country new to orbital launching can use to effectively legislate on the matter in a way that draws potential investment and business opportunities into a country, but also in a sustainable and responsible manner while upholding national security and defence interests, respecting international law, and protecting the environment, property, and human health and safety.

Archie Zariski BA, LLB, LLM, GDip HEd, is Professor of Legal Studies and Director of the Graduate Diploma in Legislative Drafting at Athabasca University. After practicing as a litigator in Alberta, Canada he pursued a second career as a legal academic at Murdoch University Australia and the University of Alberta and Athabasca University in Canada. His research and writing spans the areas of alternative dispute resolution, legal education, and legislative drafting.

The development of plain language drafting has required culture change in drafting offices. This presentation explores the drivers of such change including political will and the leadership of senior legislative counsel. Where both are stronger the philosophy and practice of plain language drafting has developed to the greatest degree exemplified by what I call "plain language+". Plain language+ goes beyond simplicity and clarity of style to include explicit aids to understanding and use of legislation that traditionally were not included in legislative text. Accessibility is now the touchstone of plain language legislation.