Legal transparency through multi-layered drafting. Having your cake and eating it too?

Law is often left out of discussions about transparency. Huge amounts are said and written about transparency in business, government and even social interactions (Hood 2006 p.6-7); but law is usually ignored. Why is that? Perhaps the answer is that we assume that law is already transparent, because transparency is the core formal principle of law. Law has strong formal transparency: statutes, regulations and important caselaw are always published; if they are not published, according to the principle of legality, they are not law. Individuals, in certain situations, have non-derogable rights to legal information. The rule that ignorance of the law is no excuse for illegal activity is premised on the idea that ignorance of the law is a choice, and that any person who wishes to educate themselves about their rights and obligations can do so. Despite this, law often fails to create effective transparency; that is, transparency which actually communicates information from a source to a receptor, with the information then being processed and understood by the receptor (Heald 2006 p.35). It is safe to say that noone – not even lawyers – are actually aware of more than a fraction of the rights and duties they possess.. To some degree, this is an inevitable result of the size and complexity of law: it is also in part a result of the inherently uncertain nature of law – legislative, jurisprudential, implementation and social changes constantly alter the meaning of laws.