the.com/legislation
How society turns its arguments into paperwork everyone has to obey.
means The body of laws a governing authority formally drafts and enacts, plus the whole process of making them.
from From Latin legislatio, built from lex (law) and latio (a bringing, a proposing — from ferre, to carry or bear). So underneath the bureaucratic weight of the word is a simple image: someone carrying a law into being, bearing it before the people. It entered English in the 1600s, riding in alongside legislator and legislature as Latin-derived vocabulary for the new machinery of formal lawmaking.
- longest law
- US tax code runs millions of words, nobody reads it all
- fastest passage
- UK's 1939 war act took one day to become law
- oldest surviving
- Code of Ur-Nammu predates Hammurabi by three centuries
- naming trick
- bill titles are often backronyms designed to sound noble