What is a Legislative Law Lawyer?

Answer 1

A legislative law lawyer combines together knowledge of the political landscape and the law. The goal of a legislative lawyer is to draft legislation which meets specific goals, while still standing a reasonable chance of being passed into law. Alternatively, a legislative lawyer may attempt to prevent laws from being passed which are unfavorable. They are the ones who write the content of the law. Legislative law lawyers are not very common. Those who work in the field can typically be divided into one of two different categories. There are some legislative attorneys who function as a lobbyist. In most cases, they represent clients which are very powerful, and consist of a large number of interested parties. The primary goal of this type of legislative lawyer is to make a case to congress for certain types of laws to be passed. In most cases, they are not heavily involved in the legal language of the lawmaking process. The second group of legislative lawyers are less likely to think of themselves as lobbyists, and more likely to consider themselves traditional lawyers. They engage in litigation. In many cases, these types of lawyers will be heavily consulted upon during the drafting of a new law, if they aren't called upon to draft the majority of the bill themselves. The advice of this type of legislative lawyer may be discounted or ignored by lobbyists and strategists because they feel that the lawyer is ignorant of the political scene. Many lobbyists, regardless of whether or not they are licensed attorneys, do not spend a great deal of time performing legal analysis while working on a law. The reason for this is that they are too heavily involved with coalition meetings, grassroots activism, media, and speaking with staff and legislators. For this reason, they do not have time to check through a great deal of former cases in order to look for legal precedent. On the other end, legislative law lawyers who have the time to review all of the case work are often uninformed about the realities of the political processes involved in legislation. As an example, a clerical legislative law lawyer may insist that specific language should be used in the drafting of a bill, citing legal precedent. A lobbying legislative lawyer may then respond by saying that this specific language can not be included in the bill, because a specific senator will object to the language and refuse to pass the bill.