A model act, also called a model law or a piece of model legislation, is a suggested example for a law, drafted centrally to be disseminated and suggested for enactment in multiple independent legislatures. The motivation classically has been the hope of fostering more legal uniformity among jurisdictions, and better practice in legislative wording, than would otherwise occur; another motivation sometimes has been lobbying disguised under such ideals. Model laws can be intended to be enacted verbatim, to be enacted after minor modification, or to serve more as general guides for the legislatures.
Model laws are especially prevalent in federations because the federal subjects (for example, states, provinces, or other subjects) are autonomous or semi-autonomous but nonetheless can benefit from a substantial degree of uniformity of laws among jurisdictions. For example, in the United States, because the country consists of 50 semi-autonomous states, each with its own legislature and set of laws, avoidance of needless variation is valuable, reserving variation only to essential autonomous differences. There, model laws are referred to as model acts or model bills. Many American special interest groups draft model acts which they lobby lawmakers to pass. In particular, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has successfully gotten hundreds of model acts passed since 2010. Uniform acts are model acts intended to be enacted exactly as written. They are drafted by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a state-run non-profit organization whose purpose is to draft laws in areas where uniformity is important (for example, to facilitate interstate commerce).
The concept is not specific to federations, and international organizations such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and the European Union have also written model laws to harmonize laws between different countries.
Although model acts inherently can serve valid purposes (such as for uniform justice, with less capriciousness), their distortion into disguised lobbying has been criticized. American critics of such model laws have thus referred to them as "copycat laws", "fill-in-the-blanks laws", and "copy-paste laws". The concept caused some controversy in 2019 when a coalition of 30 investigative journalists published a series called "Copy, Paste, Legislate", investigating the corporate interests behind many model laws.