The Legislative Process

Owned by Alex Sexton
Last updated: Apr 12, 2022
1 min read

When you want to write legislation, there's a specific process that you should follow. A good resolution takes about eight hours to write; a good bill takes about 12 hours to write. There is no way to get around this time investment. Writing sloppy legislation will produce sloppy results and will result in a sloppy, unproductive process. 

This is a collaborative process!

Legislating is a collaborative process, and everyone seldom gets what they want. The process is full of compromises, negotiations, tricks, and amendments; but at the end of the tunnel the process is so rewarding. But never get too attached to a piece of legislation—there are a variety of reasons that legislation can die. Sometimes the legislation just wasn't needed; other times the issues was resolved without the legislation needing to pass; sometimes you have the right piece of legislation at the wrong moment. It's a complicated, human process filled with human foibles. 

The Broad Strokes

We can broadly divide the legislative process into five steps:

  1. Formulation and research;
  2. Drafting;
  3. Introduction;
  4. Negotiation; and
  5. Implementation.

Formulation and Research

The policy formulation stage 




The Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) is a sponsored student organization at the University of Texas at Austin and is the legislative student organization tasked with advocating for graduate students. The GSA neither speaks nor claims to speak on the University of Texas at Austin's behalf and the inclusion of any university branding marks, including the GSA's logo, does not constitute the university's endorsement of the GSA's position or advocacy. Despite being a sponsored university unit, the GSA is a student organization that represents only the students the GSA is authorized to and tasked with representing.