Taming the complexity of the law: modelling and visualisation of dynamically interacting legal systems.

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This project aims at modelling and quantifying the complexity of legal systems and devising innovative ways to visualise and navigate the UK legal corpus beyond the traditional 'textual' paradigm. The phases of the project entail data collection, visualisation/user experience design, numerical modelling and development of novel quantitative tools to assess the complexity of dynamically interacting and ever-evolving units of a dense network (for instance, the articles or chapters of a living Act). I will address the long-standing and high-impact problem of the volume and intricacy of the UK legislative production by proposing a fresh departure from traditional ways of conceiving, connecting and 'measuring' legal documents. The framework I propose is timely, innovative and truly interdisciplinary. My ambition is to change the way legislation is produced, displayed, and eventually exploited by end-users, while claiming at the same time that recent developments in network theory and complexity science can and should induce a cultural switch between 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' approaches to legal complexity. This project is rooted in the observation that many disciplines - ranging from finance to biomedical sciences - have recently witnessed a 'data explosion'. Network-based tools have greatly advanced our understanding of large intra-connected systems as diverse as stock markets and the human genome. The UK legal system has faced similar challenges in terms of accumulation of information: there are perhaps about 50,000,000 words of law in force in the UK legislative system (in comparison, there are only about 25,000 genes in the human genome) and 100,000 are produced and amended each month. Surprisingly, though, few quantitative approaches have been undertaken so far to model, visualise and tame the complexity of legal systems. The legal corpus is still accessed via the same tools used for centuries: manual word searches and references to numbered paragraphs. In reality, legal provisions are continuously created, amended and repealed, and typically point towards other ones, either older or located elsewhere, making the legal corpus a dynamical and highly intra-connected entity. Understanding a single provision often requires awareness of the 'big picture', and 'localised' interventions may indeed produce undesired or unforeseen "long-range" consequences. In 2013, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launched the ''Good law" initiative "with a shared objective of making legislation work well for the users of today and tomorrow". However, it is not at all clear whether a naive item-removing strategy (as proposed in the standard Red Tape or 2-out-1-in initiatives) is the only viable option - or, better, if it is a viable option at all - to keep the intricacy of the law under control. My vision is that advanced network theory, digital tools and analytical techniques borrowed from Complexity Science and Information Theory can and should be combined in an unprecedented synergy to set new objectively measurable standards in the drafting, accessibility and user-friendliness of laws.