Parliamentary scrutiny of the quality of legislation in Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Germany, there is no exhaustive institutionalised process of scrutiny for parliament to ensure the quality of laws. Neither the members of parliament nor the parliamentary administration are tasked with this quality review. In fact, the German legislative procedure draws on a pluralistic concept of quality review: all organs and persons involved in legislation are called upon in order to ensure good legislative quality. This concept stresses the political reality of the principle of democracy, rather than the legal rationality resulting from the rule of law, and therefore accepts inferior laws based on democratic legitimacy rather than good laws that in turn do not rely upon the expertise of democratically non-legitimated committees. An equilibrium between these poles can only be found in time: after all, laws are amendable, thus adaptive and improvable.