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The importance of effectiveness in lawmaking is acknowledged by scholars and practitioners alike. Yet the concept remains one of the most vague terms in legal vocabulary. The article maintains that effectiveness has concrete content that reflects the systemic coherence and alignment between four fundamental elements of legislation: objectives, content, context and results. From this perspective effective legislation is the result of complex mechanics in the conceptualisation, design and drafting of the law and cannot materialise unless it is a clear concern in the early phases of lawmaking. The article takes a closer look at the fundamental elements of effectiveness and articulates the specific challenges that lawmakers are facing when attempting to design and draft effective rules. The “effectiveness test”, a conceptual tools that adds “effectiveness lenses” to the existing lawmaking toolkit, is developed in more depth to a set of critical questions that lawmakers need to address in order to make conscious decisions on effective drafts.

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The article discusses the importance of effectiveness of legislation in the context of law reform and presents the 'effectiveness test' as an operational tool that can promote legislative quality and effectiveness across the life cycle of legislation.

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