The Legislative Drafting in Sweden: Its Informal and Non-Linear Nature

It is true that recent decades have seen, in particular in the Western and Western based legal system, a decline of importance of positive law as a regulatory tool. However, from the legal discourse perspective, national legislative law and its drafting still retain a central role. Looking at the Swedish example, this article investigates how the Scandinavian country has structured a rather articulated and well-developed legislative process. However, despite this central role in the law, the Swedish legislative drafting is characterized for being mainly based on often unwritten and quite well hidden constitutional practices rather than on clear and explicit constitutional provisions. These features of the Swedish legislative drafting are inconsistent, when juxtaposed to the general and very strong legal principle overseeing the work of the public actors in the Scandinavian country: the transparency of their activities in the eyes of the ordinary citizens.