Quality, implementable, and widely acceptable laws are fundamental components of good governance, and the enactment of non-prioritized, dispersed, and unenforceable laws is a core challenge facing governance systems in many countries. Law impact assessment, as a tool to address this issue, is employed in numerous countries in both ex ante and ex post phases. The components of law impact assessment vary according to the foundational principles of each country’s governance system and are designed to align with their legal structures.



The central research question of this study concerns the components of law impact assessment within the desirable governance framework of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To reach an answer, these components were redesigned from the Constitution, the constitutive source of the country’s governance system, by employing a content-analysis approach. In this process, 177 constitutional provisions were studied and 500 initial codes generated; through iterative examination, these codes and initial concepts were refined and transformed into 138 open codes.



Subsequently, after refining the foundational concepts and categories, the law impact assessment components were elaborated across six dimensions: religious, socio-cultural, political, economic, environmental, and legislative principles. The findings indicate that grounding in Islamic norms, encompassing public interest and non-contravention with Islamic rulings, constitutes the religious components; the promotion of Islamic culture and the centrality of the family constitute the socio-cultural components; the protection of the environment and attention to intergenerational justice constitute the main environmental components; the preservation of political freedoms and the unity of the Muslim world constitute the political components; the rejection of monopolies and economic corruption, attention to the private and cooperative sectors, and the avoidance of economic dependence constitute the main economic components; and drawing on the legal experiences of other countries and adherence to the principles of law drafting constitute the main components of the legislative principles.