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Concept

Legislation

Legislation
Constitutional Convention · Public domain · source

Overview

Legislation is the process or result of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating laws by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred to as "legislation" while it remains under consideration to distinguish it from other business. Legislation can have many purposes: to regulate, to authorize, to outlaw, to provide (funds), to sanction, to grant, to declare, or to restrict. It may be contrasted with a non-legislative act by an executive or administrative body under the authority of a legislative act.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

  1. Legislation, as we have said, borrows the pure philosophy of right, or the doctrine of the nature and limits of right and wrong, from ethics, in order to apply it from the reverse side to its own ends, which are different from those of ethics, and to institute positive legislation and the means of supporting it, _i.e._, the state, in accordance with it. Positive legislation is thus the inverted application of the…

    Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea

    Names Legislation several times; states what Legislation is.

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  2. However, as the true object of legislation is only perceived by a few, and most men are almost incapable of grasping it, though they live under its conditions, legislators, with a view to exacting general obedience, have wisely put forward another object, very different from that which necessarily follows from the nature of law: they promise to the observers of the law that which the masses chiefly desire, and…

    Benedictus de Spinoza, The Philosophy of Spinoza

    States what Legislation is; opens on Legislation.

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  3. If that, as yet considerable, majority of the House of Commons who never desire to move an amendment or make a speech would no longer leave the whole regulation of business to those who do; if they would bethink themselves that better qualifications for legislation exist, and may be found if sought for, than a fluent tongue, and the faculty of getting elected by a constituency, it would soon be recognized that, in…

    John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government

    Names Legislation several times; opens on Legislation.

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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Liberalism.

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