The last few weeks we have witnessed what we could perfectly describe as a true legislative holocaust. We are totally immersed in a delirious production of regulations that hardly allows us to know with certainty what is and what is not in force. This is what we lawyers refer to when we talk about legal certainty, one of the key constitutional principles on which our rule of law is based.. And I am not talking about being able to understand the rules and knowing how to comply with them or apply them correctly. Let's stay in a previous stage: knowing what we are obliged to and what rules we must comply with.

Carl Schmitt spoke exactly a century ago now of the concept of “motorized legislation” to refer to the regulatory overproduction and its excessive volatility.. Let him not raise his head, we better let him rest in peace. The normative incontinence that Ortega y Gasset said that, without disrespecting anyone, today could almost be described as true diarrhea, is stinking our parliaments to levels unknown up to now. And everything happens almost without worrying us, without any panic, more settled in the anecdote and laughter than in terror, as if it were a good joke..

For a simple sample, the explanatory note that the Official State Gazette had to insert a few days ago in the consolidated version of the consolidated text of the law on infractions and sanctions in the social order. What happened? Well, Laws 3 and 4 of 2023, promulgated and published on the same day, on March 1, and which have also entered into force on the same day, have given two different wordings to the same paragraph.. It was nothing more and nothing less than defining an infraction, what in technical jargon we call typifying. The BOE, without being able to do anything other than verify such a catastrophe, has limited itself to dropping such an aberration with a subtle “take into account”, reproducing both versions. It is unlikely for any mortal that the law enforcer can choose one version or another according to their preferences or tastes, or worse, depending on the day.. As outlandish as it may seem to us, the situation allows this to happen.

An error in the drafting of an article of the so-called Rhodes law, for the comprehensive protection of children and adolescents against violence, has modified the Penal Code to allow double counting of the statute of limitations for crimes against freedom sexual, when the alleged perpetrator is a minor. The norm now enables the computation to understand liability extinguished, something of vital importance, can be counted either from the time the person turns 18, or 35. They are barely 17 years apart due to this editorial slip.

Not to mention the mistaken disappearance of the prohibition for administrations to contract with people penalized for some very serious infraction of those provided for in the law for the protection of people who report on regulatory infractions and the fight against corruption. The so-called trans law has been the cause of this prohibition having been in force for only a few days and has disappeared without a trace. We are no longer talking about the controversy generated and known to all as a result of the so-called law of only yes is yes.

If something will have caught the reader's attention by now, apart from the string of normative horrors that we are narrating, it is that we all know the norms better by their nickname than by their real title, which is still a secondary reflection and minor relevance of the growing difficulties of titling our norms well.

Regarding the reasons for this phenomenon, which is now becoming more serious, although it was easy to predict, several can be outlined.. Some of them are a reflection of our current social and political reality and, therefore, difficult to avoid because they have come, as they say, to stay: the political division of our parliaments and the emergence of coalition governments. Two phenomena that, in themselves, have nothing wrong. Starting with pact governments, practice shows that in most cases they function as if there were more than one government.. In the equation, the result can be misrule. Each force acts guided by its concerns, with its own roadmap and initiatives, directly influencing the ministries they direct, but poorly coordinating with those that are beyond their authority.. This circumstance undoubtedly affects internal cohesion and coherence, the absence of which is clearly reflected in the maturity and consistency of the regulatory projects.. For its part, the multitude of political forces with parliamentary representation, many of them with a minimum number of members, makes it difficult to carefully reflect on and study regulatory initiatives.. Although on a theoretical level this diversity should enrich the debate, the practical translation is a greater disorder and neglect of the technical quality of the standard.

Faced with this undesirable situation, there is an urgent need for greater controls and more effective supervision of the Office of Coordination and Regulatory Quality under the Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory, an office surely devoid of sufficient resources to carry out the work for which it was created and that it bears in its last names. With a simple rank of deputy general directorate, however, he has in his hands the arduous task of coordinating the government regulatory initiative, a task that has turned out to be tortuous in this legislature that is already drawing to a close.. But this task is not only up to her, since nonsense often arises from the approval in parliament of amendments that not only contradict each other, but also the text they are incorporated into.. For this reason, the services of the chambers, especially their general secretaries and the lawyers who provide their services, also have an important mission of detecting and warning slips as egregious as those already mentioned..

And not to leave anyone out of the picture, it is also worth mentioning the Constitutional Court, which in its work to control the constitutionality of the laws should recover its valuable doctrine from the early 1990s, in which it emphasized the importance of the technical quality of standards as a guarantee of legal certainty. In recent times, there is a certain condescension with such negligence and regulatory acrobatics, and a return to the Cistercian rule should be imposed.

We're not on the right track, no, but we're still on time.

*Joaquín Meseguer Yebra is academic C. of the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation and teaching expert in normative technique. He promoted the creation of the Spanish Regulatory Quality Network. He currently works at the Madrid City Council.