But O'Donnell, in the classic style of a civil servant preparing for every contingency, moved to protect the Queen ahead of the expected hung parliament in 2010 by codifying an established, but unwritten, principle in his cabinet manual.
So when Sonny Perdue, Georgia's governor, signed an ambitious and comprehensive transport bill that was three years in the making into law on June 2nd, he did so not by bridging those divisions but by codifying them.The bill divides Georgia into 12 regions, and gives each the power to decide on its own transport projects.
Most people struggle to write it correctly.Some pan-Arabist thinkers have called for codifying a "middle Arabic", based on the written standard, but stripped of much unnecessary complexity and including the most common dialectal features.
This is a tricky process, involving codifying all the elements of a contract, from the specifications of the product to performance guarantees, so that bidders can compete fairly in an auction.
These developments have sparked complex and emotive debates about how to handle the final stages of life.The Dutch parliament is currently considering a bill which would make permanent a 15-year experiment in allowing doctor-assisted suicide by codifying in law regulations which have governed such practices.
This class of bordeaux, which ranks below the superleague of the grands crus classés, ranked in 1855, had escaped the codifying hand of the state for decades.
(The cost for asset managers has yet to be calculated).But codifying a "fiduciary rule" is not as easy as Messrs Obama and Perez make it sound.
A longer-term task is to overhaul the treaties themselves, making them more specific and codifying concepts such as universal jurisdiction.
The Law Commission, which reports to the Home Office, produces endless reports on codifying centuries'-worth of laws, but home secretaries are not interested.
The most celebrated French cookbooks were written by superstar chefs who had a clear sense of codifying a unified haute cuisine.
In 2000 it solicited the Uniform Law Commission, a nonprofit group that writes model bills for state legislatures, to draft a law codifying its restrictions on interactions between student-athletes and agents—including bans on players accepting payments or gifts, and on their agreeing to sign with an agent before their collegiate careers end.
