Development of the eLen Regulation Database to Support Legislation of Municipalities

The rules of law enacted by municipalities include regulations, rules, notifications, orders, etc., among which only regulations require the approval of local assemblies. The rest, which substantially outnumber regulations, are drawn up by administrative agencies or other organizations created by relevant acts or regulations. Those who write statutes for municipalities are not necessarily experts at law, despite the importance of such a task for administration. Drafting requires a lot work, not only for policy design, but also for the regulation’s description. When proofreading a bill, drafters often refer to regulations enacted in other municipalities. However, at present, there is no database of regulations for cross-searching among municipalities. Therefore, drafters are forced to manually cross-search the website of each municipality, which makes it virtually impossible to cover all 1,790 municipalities. Our project of e-Legislation aims to develop a database, which we call the eLen regulation database, to support municipal legislation. We conducted a field investigation of the demand for such a database. Our interviews with drafters revealed the need for various functions for a keyword search, which we then included in our system.