At 36 Whitehall is to be found the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, where, in a small set of rooms, work those who actually draft the Bills which become Acts of Parliament. Users of statutes may perhaps have wondered, from time to time, just how many human attributes the draftsmen of our statutes possess. Indeed, are the draftsmen even human? And, if human, surely their native language is not the English tongue. The truth, as so often happens, is much more mundane. Parliamentary Counsel are a group of 20 or so men and women, all either solicitors or barristers, all formerly in practice, who are required to carry out an enormously difficult task, generally given far too little time to do it in and subject to pressures which would drive an ordinary lawyer into asking his clients whether they would not prefer to go to someone else next time. Not only must a Bill give effect to the precise policy intended, even when construed by implacable policital opponents or (as it may sometimes seem to the draftsman) by invincibly ignorant judges, but it has to go through a parliamentary procedure which