Model laws are laws drafted centrally to be disseminated and enacted in multiple independent legislatures. Such laws can be intended to be enacted verbatim, with minor modification or to serve more as guides for the legislatures.

Model laws are especially prevalent in the United States because the country consists of 50 partially self-governing states, each with its own legislature and set of laws. There, model laws are referred to as model acts or model bills. Many American special interest groups draft model acts which they lobby politicians 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 Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a state-run non-profit organization whose purpose is to draft laws in areas in which uniformity is important. For example, to facilitate interstate trade.

The concept isn't endogenous to the United States; 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.

American critics of model laws have 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 thirty investigative journalists who published a series called "Copy, Paste, Legislate" investigating the corporate interests behind many model laws.