Work on better law-making and quality of legislation has boomed over the last decade. It is often cast as a gateway to law that better lives up to its very nature of rule-making in a normatively valuable sense, where societal challenges can be meaningfully tackled and goals achieved. There is a growing literature on the quality of legislative practices in relation to an ever-expanding array of policy fields – from cybersecurity to linguistic policies – yet citizenship and migration policy has not yet been scrutinised. Our aim is to explore how arbitrariness and discretionary practices in the field of migration law are hindered, or fostered, by the adoption of specific law-making practices. We investigate what we can learn about how law-making puts discretion at work in the field of migration and citizenship policy, by bringing together those with an interest in the quality of law-making with scholars working on migration. This panel is one out of two and focuses on theory.