adjournment sine die

Heidi Poyer is a legislative drafting attorney based in Springfield, IL.

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That vs Which

If removing the clause changes the meaning of the sentence, use "that".

Honeydew that is ripe is actually pretty delicious.  

The phrase "that is ripe" is a restrictive clause because if you take it out, the sentence becomes crazy talk. Nobody like honeydew.

If the clause is simply providing extra information and taking it out doesn't change the meaning of the sentence, use "which".

Honeydew, which has been called the Ringo Starr of the melon kingdom, is the only fruit still available.

The phrase "which has been called the Ringo Starr of the melon kingdom" is a nonrestrictive clause because removing it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. Also, note that the proper way to punctuate a nonrestrictive clause is to separate it from the rest of the sentence with commas (or parentheses).

When drafting legislation, the vast majority of clauses are essential, which means that you must take care not to punctuate the sentence incorrectly with commas, or use the word "which" when you mean "that".  

From the 2012 edition of the Illinois Bill Drafting Manual: 

From the Utah Drafting Manual: 

Often, in legislative drafting, the nonrestrictive clause is not useful and should not be included.

Oh, but check out the style guide put out by the Uniform Laws Commission, Rule 206 (c ) and (d)!

(c ) Use “that” to introduce a restrictive clause that is intended to modify the nearer of two possible antecedents. 

Example: An application to renew a license that has been revoked must be accompanied by a certificate of good standing. 

(d) Use “which” to introduce a restrictive clause that is intended to modify the remote, rather than the nearer, of two possible antecedents. 

Example: An application to renew a license which has been rejected may be resubmitted not later than 30 days after rejection. 

In this example, the antecedent is “application”, not “license”.

It turns out that, in very specific instances, “which” can be used to introduce a restrictive clause, especially in uniform laws. It is used when referring to a distant antecedent. 

This is an obscure rule that could make a huge difference to a court construing a statute. Drafters especially need to be aware of its potential effect on statutory construction.

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How to Get Legislation Passed in 3 Hours (A Primer on Shell Bills)

If you have been following along this session, you will know that yesterday, the House introduced, debated, and passed a 500-page spending bill in about 3 hours. Perhaps you can think of other instances in which a legislator complained that he or she was not given time to properly analyze a proposed piece of legislation before being asked to vote on it. You may be wondering how such circumstances are possible. 

In Illinois, the answer is shell bills. 

Section 8(d) of Article IV of the Illinois Constitution provides, “A bill shall be read by title on three different days in each house.” 

Given the above constitutional requirement, it normally takes at least 6 days to pass a bill through both chambers - 3 in the House, and 3 in the Senate. Usually it takes even longer, because there are a lot of bills, and they and their amendments normally get heard and debated in committee before they make it to the floor for debate.

However, this normal process can be bypassed. Every year, hundreds of bills get filed that appear to do nothing at all. Many of them make a change that looks something like this this. Others appropriate $2 to a given State agency. These types of bills are called “shell bills” or “vehicle bills.” They work their way through the normal legislative process alongside the other run-of-the-mill legislation. Sometimes, amendments get filed to make formerly substantive bills non-substantive. This type of amendment is called a “shell-out.” 

The result is that at the end of Session, there are a good number of shell bills on Third Reading. Nothing will come of many of these bills. However, if the Speaker of the House or the Senate President cooperates (or is behind the measure), it is possible to amend a bill on Third Reading to include substantive language and pass it out of the chamber all on the same day. If the bill has already been approved by the first chamber, the opposite chamber can approve it on concurrence that same day. Boom. The 6-day process just became 1.    

Let’s take a look at the Bill Status page for Senate Bill 2048 (a.k.a. the funding plan from yesterday that was “passed in 3 hours”). First of all, you will notice that this bill was originally filed in March. You will also notice that the synopsis for the introduced version of the bill appropriates $2 to the Legislative Research Unit. This is how you know it started out as a shell, because it did nothing substantive.

Senate Bill 2048 is very interesting, because you will see that earlier in May, Senate Floor Amendment No. 1 was adopted. This amendment replaced the non-substantive shell bill language with appropriations for higher education. The bill was passed out of the Senate a couple days later. Pretty quick, but not breakneck speed. 

Then the bill sat in the House for a few weeks. But when it was on Second Reading, a new amendment was adopted putting the shell bill language back in. What was the House playing at?

We had our answer yesterday, when Amendment No. 2 was introduced right around 4:30pm, was adopted shortly after, and the House voted to pass the bill right around 7:30.

And that’s how legislation can be passed within 3 hours of becoming public. What’s more, because Senate Bill 2048 already passed the Senate, if the Senate President and the Speaker of the House were really cooking together, the Senate could have approved the bill on concurrence and sent it right to the Governor for his signature (or veto, as the case may be) that same day. 

In theory, legislation really can be filed, passed, and enacted within a few hours. Of course, for that to happen, the Speaker of the House, the Senate President, the rank and file legislators, and the Governor all have to be on board. Such a thing would be remarkable indeed.  

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And/Or

Remember this the next time you are tempted to use “and/or”: 

. . . that befuddling, nameless thing, that Janus-faced verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase, the child of a brain of someone too lazy or too dull to express his precise meaning, or too dull to know what he did mean, now commonly used by lawyers in drafting legal documents, through carelessness or ignorance or as a cunning device to conceal rather than express meaning with view to furthering the interest of their clients. 

Employers' Mut. Liability Ins. Co. of Wisconsin v. Tollefsen  263 N.W. 376, 377 (Wis. 1935)

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In Case You Were Not Quite Realizing Just How Crazy Things Are in Illinois Right Now.

The General Assembly passed a budget that needs something like $5 billion in additional revenue in order to balance. Governor Rauner approved the funding for education, vetoed the rest. The new fiscal year started July 1, 2015. It is now August 27, 2015 and there is no spending plan in place. Yet because of a combination of federally-mandated spending, court orders, and administrative actions, the State is spending almost 90% of last year’s budget. State workers are getting paid, pension obligations are being met, the freaking State Fair happened. We are basically terrible at government shutdown.

Now would also be a good time to take a moment and appreciate the insanity of the fact that spending is, for the most part, no longer in the hands of policymakers. The legislature and executive have basically punted to the judiciary the issue of what to spend money on and what to cut. Turns out judges aren't particularly interested in the cutting business. The jurisprudence is basically, "Well, the law says this is a thing. Either pay for it or change the law."

And of course, at the rate the money is getting spent, we're going to end up several billion dollars short.

What I take away from all this is that an income tax hike is coming, and it's going to be big. The only question is who is going to get blamed for it. This summer has been a long, slow dance consisting of the power players trying to maneuver themselves in a way to direct blame in the most politically advantageous way possible. They are all very smart and appear to be playing a zero-sum game, so this could take a while to play out. 

In the meantime, I wonder if the courts are going to end up getting asked to order a tax increase. I can’t possibly conceive of any constitutional justification for it, but we seem to be moving in that direction. This week, a judge gets to decide whether to hold the Comptroller in contempt for not making court-ordered payments (presumably because there isn’t any money in the till). 

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Obscure Illinois Law of the Day

"Pedestrians shall move, whenever practicable, upon the right half of crosswalks."

625 ILCS 5/11-1005

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And grammarphiles everywhere rejoiced. 

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Parliamentary Quirks

Not unlike in sports, the end of a legislative session is the time for the more obscure rules to have their moment in the sun.

This year, there was talk for weeks that the General Assembly would adjourn early. Between it being an election year (read: no legislative will to pass anything that might be unpopular) and the 31st falling on a Saturday (which also happened to be graduation day for many schools in Illinois), it seemed very much within the realm of possibility that adjournment for the summer would take place by Friday, May 30. 

But then last Thursday, the House passed and sent House Bill 3794, a last-minute capital projects bill, to the Senate. Senate Rule 5-2 provides that all bills in the Senate must be read on three different days prior to passage by the Senate. This meant that the earliest day the Senate could pass HB3794 was Saturday, May 31. If the Senate wished to take action on this bill, Saturday would have to be a session day. 

Not to worry, however. Everyone was still able to make it to scheduled graduation festivities. This was because the Senate adjourned at around 10:30pm on Friday, reconvened at 12:01am on Saturday, then proceeded to read for a 3rd time, debate, and pass the capital projects bill before adjourning for the summer at about 12:10am.

So despite maintaining its tendency to not adjourn for the summer until the wee hours of the morning, this year the General Assembly shaved about 24 hours off of its typical spring session.

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What is an ABR? Is it Important?

Each bill that is drafted by the Legislative Reference Bureau includes a short summary phrase called an ABR. The ABR is used for digest purposes, and is also displayed on the electronic voting boards in each chamber. The ABR appears with all capitalized letters and is limited to 30 total characters including spaces. 

The ABR will commonly include a reference to the Act being amended and/or the affected State agency. Ideally, the ABR also includes at least one key word that would make it easy for someone to identify the bill by subject matter.

It is easy to identify shell bills using the ABR because these ABRs follow a very set formula. A shell bill ABR will list the subject matter of the bill, accompanied by the word "tech". For example, a shell bill for transportation legislation would have an ABR of "TRANSPORTATION-TECH". 

More information about the ABR, including common abbreviations of Acts and agencies and other shorthand that is used in drafting the ABR, can be found in Section 40-25 of the Illinois Bill Drafting Manual.

A recent Capitol Fax post (available by clicking here) highlights how an ABR can potentially make or break a bill. The post reproduces an email from Rep. Jeanne Ives, in which she describes how a bill which deleted references to an obsolete fee received 47 NO votes, simply because the ABR had the words "TIRE FEE" in it. 

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How to Read an LRB Number

Just about every legislative document that gets filed in the Illinois legislature contains a funny little number starting with "LRB." This number's official title is the draft name, but we colloquially refer to it as the "LRB number." You'll find it below the synopsis on the cover page of a bill or constitutional amendment resolution and in the upper right corner on all other pages.

Senate Bill 1046's LRB number is

LRB098 05333 HEP 35367 b

and it packs a lot of useful information:

The "LRB" tells us that the legislation was drafted by the Legislative Reference Bureau. LRB drafts the vast majority of bills and amendments, but there are some exceptions, such as Senate Bill 2424, which was drafted by the Office of Management & Budget. So I suppose the LRB number for that bill is actually an OMB number. 

The "098" means that the bill was drafted during the 98th General Assembly. Illinois' legislative session runs in 2-year periods; we're in the 2nd year of our current (98th) General Assembly. 

"05333" refers to the file number that is assigned to the draft. What this means is that in the file cabinets in our office, there is a file with that number, and that file contains the instructions provided for the bill draft and any other correspondence or information the drafter saw fit to include with the file. Also, any amendments, conference committee reports, or amendatory veto motions concerning a particular bill share the same file number as the bill (and those drafts end up in the same file as the bill). 

"HEP" are the initials of the attorney who drafted the document; in this case, yours truly. 

"35367" is the log identification number which is unique to the document. 

"b" tells us that the document is a bill. Other letters indicate other types of legislative documents; for example: 

"a" means the document is an amendment.

"c" means the document is a conference committee report.

"e" means the document is a Constitutional amendment.

"r" means the document is a resolution.

"s" means the document is a revisory bill.

"v" means the document is an amendatory veto motion.

So, looking at LRB098 05333 HEP 35367 b, we are able to tell that it: 1) is a bill; 2) was prepared sometime in 2013 or 2014; 3) was drafted by HEP; and 4) came out of LRB.

If you do a legislation search for the file number on the ilga.gov website (for example, if you clicked here and entered "05333"), it will pull up the bill and any amendments that have been filed. Handy, eh?

I remember when I first started working here, I was impressed that a number that seemed like just a bunch of gibberish could hold so much meaning.  Not only that, but the LRB number is the foundation of the information system that keeps track of legislative documents as they shuffle through the legislative process, a process which is, for the most part, depicted in real time on General Assembly website.  

This post was supplemented with information from Section 40-30 of the Illinois Bill Drafting Manual.

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Nicely Done.

We are nearing the end of the legislative Session, and overall I'd say that it has been a pleasure to work with the overwhelming majority of people who have come into my cubicle this season. This last week especially - it has been so nice to get so many phone calls, emails, visits, and even gifts(!) thanking me for the work I did on various bills. I am simply happy to be of help, but feeling so appreciated this year has been a true bonus. 

And let's not forget to mention all of the lunches, thank you cards, and other treats that our office receives throughout the year. Recognizing the whole office in this way is particularly classy because it really is a team effort, involving at least 5 different people, to get any given drafting request out the door. 

I've also valued on a fundamental level the many, many folks who have gotten drafting requests to me as early as possible and have been upfront about the deadline (regardless of how long or short it is). Things can get crazy around here very quickly and we're not always able to keep track of the countless parliamentary deadlines, so we operate as if the end of the world will happen if the draft is not ready by the time it is asked for. But at the same time, the more time the drafting and reviewing attorneys have to look everything over, the better the end product will be. Even an extra hour or two can make a huge difference. And when everybody operates this way, it is easier for us to manage office resources so that when true drafting emergencies arise, we are able to handle them with ease. Helping us to help you in this way is truly appreciated and makes everybody's life just a little bit more pleasant.

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We are a 100% nonpartisan office that has zero influence in public policy decision making, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have some serious feelings of goodwill toward whichever lobbyist it was that bought us lunch from Smokey Bones. 

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Just stumbled upon this nifty infographic of what it takes for a bill to become a law in Illinois.

(Check it out by clicking here.)

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This sure feels good, even though I'm sure it won't stay this way for long. 

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I’m actually feeling pretty judgmental about the person who didn't use the oxford comma in this ecard. 

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My Office's Sweet Website

I'm not sure that the website of the Legislative Reference Bureau can rightfully be called a full site - there's no catchy domain name and it's located 2 clicks off the main ilga.gov site. I'd consider it more like a webpage on link steroids. 

But what it lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in usefulness. This is the place to go to find information about the Legislative Reference Bureau, LRB's Freedom of Information Act policy, researching legislative history, and the organization of the Illinois Compiled Statutes. 

If you want to try your hand at drafting some legislation, go check out the Illinois Bill Drafting Manual. 

You can also find handy conversion charts related to when we made the switch from the Illinois Revised Statutes to the Illinois Compiled Statutes and when they re-wrote the criminal law, as well as the ILCS Index by Act. 

Finally, the webpage contains a number of items of non-legislation that the LRB prepares on a regular basis, such as the Legislative Synopsis and Digest, Case Reports, and Uniform State Laws Reports. 

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Illinois Continuing Legal Education

Every so often, I remember that I have minimum continuing legal education (CLE) requirements to meet and then I give myself a mini-panic attack trying to figure out what I am supposed to do by when. If you have tried to do this recently yourself, you know what I’m talking about.

To prevent future panic attacks, I’m putting the relevant information up in this easy-to-read, easy to find tumblr post. Without further ado, here it is. For attorneys admitted November 2010:

If your last name begins with A-M, the reporting period is July 1, 2012 - June 30, 2014.

If your last name begins with N-Z, the reporting period is July 1, 2013 - June 30, 2015.

As a reminder, use your last name on file with the ARDC on your admission date; your reporting group does not change even if your name does. You have to do 30 hours of CLE during your reporting period, and 6 of those need to be Professional Responsibility CLE (in the area of professionalism, diversity, mental illness and addiction, civility or legal ethics).

All of your CLE hours must be completed by 11:59pm on the June 30 at the end of your reporting period, and you have to report your compliance by 11:59pm on the July 31 after your reporting period ends.

If you’re still confused, http://www.mcleboard.org/ may or may not help you. You might as well check that site out anyway though because it’s the one you need to go through in order to report your compliance. After logging in, I personally found it very helpful to click on "report compliance". 

For those of you who were admitted sometime other than November 2010, I found this handy info sheet (particularly page 2) on the Illinois State Bar Association website. In case it gets taken down, I also put the file up on google drive for all time. 

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Condolences to the Anastaplo Family

Was saddened to get this email today. George Anastaplo was a brilliant man and his classes were a joy to attend. He was always operating at a mental level about 5 times above everyone else, but my favorite memory of him was from right before Thanksgiving, when he very sincerely announced to the class that anybody who didn't have plans for the holiday would be welcomed at his dinner table.

I'll be keeping his family in my thoughts and prayers.