Why Is Law Complex

While there are many ways to measure complexity, Katz and Bommarito focused on finding rules and assimilating rules, which are, respectively, “How complex is the task of determining the rule or set of rules applicable to the behavior in question?” and “How complex is the process of assimilating the informational content of a set of rules?” While there are many other ways to measure legal complexity, such as the cost of complying with laws, they chose to limit their investigation to the difficulty of understanding this legal code. In order to preserve the desired multidimensionality of legal document collections and to examine their evolution over time, legislative corpora should be modelled as dynamic networks of records.20,21,22,23,24,25,26 In particular, because legal documents are carefully organized and interconnected, their structure provides a more direct window into their content and dynamics than their language: networks recognize the conscious design choices of document authors and circumvent some of the ambiguity issues inherent in natural language-based approaches. In this paper, we therefore develop a robust data model for legislative bodies that captures the wealth of legislative data for social physics research. We use our data model to analyze changes in federal laws in the United States and Germany. Here we see a sharp increase in legal complexity depending on the scope, interconnectedness and hierarchical structure of legislation in both countries – evidence that the highly industrialized countries we study are trying to guide behaviour by developing increasingly complex legal norms. Looking for sources of observed growth, we use chart aggregation techniques to identify the legal issues that contribute the most to the increase in complexity and track their evolution over time. If we derive our information on the content of legislative documents directly from the conscious structural decisions of their authors, we find that the main driver of the growth of law in the United States and Germany is the expansion of the welfare state, supported by an expansion of the fiscal state. Beyond this overall picture, our methodology also allows for finer discoveries – for example, we find that during our observation period, the regulation of natural resources in the United States shifted from exploitation to conservation. In this way, we achieve results that would be difficult (if not impossible) to achieve if we used approaches that use only the natural language of legislative documents while minimizing the number of subjective judgments. Our work highlights the potential of the analysis of legal networks and documentary networks for the study of the interaction between the bar and the bar through the prism of complex adaptive systems (CAS) 17,27,28,29,30,31 and opens new avenues of research for the interdisciplinary scientific community. Katz, D.

M. & Bommarito, M. J. Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code. Artif. Intell. Law 22, 337-374 (2014). The law must be complex. Example: Simple version of the law – it is illegal to steal. Okay, a guy picks a flower from someone else`s garden. Did he steal it? And is it the same as the guy who took a BMW that didn`t belong to him? The world is really complex. The simpler your legal system, the more erroneous it becomes.

We currently have too many complex laws, so people do not know about the law or do not respect it. For South Africa, take a look at Acts Online – see how many laws there are. These are just a few of our laws. Read some of them and see if you understand them. Most of them are simply terrible documents. More serious politicians in both parties recognize that complex issues – such as health care, taxes and national security – must be addressed in detail. But it is always reasonable to ask why so many laws seem so long. I`m really interested in how others think about complex law? Do you know them all? Have you read them? Do you intend to stick to them or simply ignore them? Certainly, the answer is a simple law. But even if you`re only looking at that kind of complexity, there are many ways to investigate it.

For example, the more closely a section of the law is linked, the more difficult it is to truly assimilate and understand the effects of the law. Here`s a look at a particularly interconnected section, a brief section of the U.S. Code dealing with the Alaska Railroad: Modern societies rely on law as the primary mechanism for controlling their development and managing their conflicts. Through carefully designed rights and duties, institutions and procedures, the law can enable people to engage in increasingly complex social and economic activities. Therefore, law plays an important role in understanding how societies change. To explore the interaction between law and society, we need to look at how the two evolve over time. This requires a reliable quantitative understanding of the changes taking place in both areas. But while the quantification of societal changes has been the subject of enormous research efforts for many years in fields such as sociology, economics or social physics1,2,3,4,5,6, much less work has been done to quantify legal change. In fact, lawyers have traditionally viewed the law as barely quantifiable, and while there is no shortage of empirical legal studies,7,8,9 researchers have only recently begun to apply data science methods to law.10,11,12,13 To date, there is relatively little quantitative work that explicitly addresses legal changes,14,15,16,17,18,19 and there is almost no science that analyzes the evolving outcomes of the legislative and executive branches of national governments on a large scale. Making these data sources accessible to the interdisciplinary scientific community will be crucial to understanding how law and society interact. So what were the most complex sections of the United States? Code? Based on their classification, Title 42 (Public Health and Well-being) appears to be the most complex and interdependent, as does the Internal Revenue Code or Title 26. Which shouldn`t surprise anyone who has tried to pay their taxes.

As you can see, it is strongly linked to other parts of the code, which increases the complexity of understanding. One way to look at complexity is to see how many connections a section has with other sections. Parliaments around the world (such as the South African Parliament, the Australian Parliament or the European Parliament) are creating more laws and expanding the scope of laws more than ever before. The number of new laws and regulations is staggering. And we`re not talking about irrelevant minor laws. Between 1994 and 2014, the South African Parliament passed 1252 laws. It is virtually impossible for anyone to read them all. I feel like I can`t keep up – and I`m a lawyer. I feel overwhelmed by complex laws. It takes a long time to read new laws, and the cost of complying with them is often enormous.

Ruhl, J. B., Katz, D. M. & Bommarito, M. J. Using legal complexity. Science 355, 1377-1378 (2017). An intriguing next step would be to see the complexity of the various titles, as well as the entire US code, change over time.

But even without that, it`s amazing how different and complex our federal laws are. I recommend reading the full document; It`s a great read. King 3 is not mandatory, but if you are asked why you did not comply with King 3, you should be able to explain why you did not do so. “Sorry what” is unfortunately not an acceptable answer. King III. ™ was in simple language, but still too complex. King IV™ will soon be released to try to solve this problem, but people will need to review their corporate governance framework. While many informal factors influence how people interact, modern societies rely on law as the primary mechanism to formally control human behavior. The impact of legal rules on social development depends on the interaction of two types of actors: the people who create the rules and the people to whom the rules potentially apply. We hypothesize that an increasingly diverse and interconnected society could create ever more diverse and interconnected rules, and argue that legal networks provide a useful lens for observing the interaction between law and society.

To evaluate these proposals, we present an innovative and generalizable model of legal documents in the form of multidimensional and evolving document networks. If we apply this model to federal legislation in the United States and Germany, we see an impressive expansion in the size and complexity of laws over the past two and a half decades. We study the causes of this development using methods from network science and natural language processing. In order to allow cross-country comparisons over time, we algorithmically reorganize U.S. and German legislative documents into families of groups that reflect legal topics based on explicit cross-references between legal regulations.