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

该项目旨在建模和量化法律系统的复杂性，并设计创新的方法来可视化和导航超越传统的“文本”范式的英国法律语料库。该项目的各个阶段包括数据收集、可视化/用户体验设计、数值建模和开发新的定量工具，以评估密集网络中动态交互和不断发展的单元（例如，活生生的法案的文章或章节）的复杂性。我将通过提出一种与传统的构思、联系和“衡量”法律文件的方式不同的新方法，来解决英国立法制作的数量和复杂性这一长期存在且影响深远的问题。我提出的框架是及时的、创新的和真正跨学科的。我的目标是改变立法产生、展示和最终被最终用户利用的方式，同时声称网络理论和复杂性科学的最新发展能够而且应该在研究法律复杂性的“定性”和“定量”方法之间引发一种文化转换。这个项目植根于这样一种观察，即许多学科——从金融到生物医学科学——最近见证了一场“数据爆炸”。基于网络的工具极大地促进了我们对大型内部连接系统的理解，如股票市场和人类基因组。英国法律体系在信息积累方面也面临着类似的挑战：在英国立法体系中，可能有大约5000万字的有效法律（相比之下，人类基因组中只有大约2.5万个基因），每月产生和修改10万个。然而，令人惊讶的是，迄今为止，很少有人采用定量方法来模拟、可视化和驯服法律体系的复杂性。法律语料库仍然通过几个世纪以来使用的相同工具进行访问：手动单词搜索和引用编号段落。在现实中，法律条款不断地被创造、修改和废除，并且通常指向其他旧的或位于其他地方的法律条款，使法律语料库成为一个动态的和高度内部联系的实体。理解单一条款通常需要对“大局”的认识，而“局部”干预确实可能产生不希望的或不可预见的“长期”后果。2013年，国会法律顾问办公室发起了“好法律”倡议，“共同目标是使立法为今天和明天的用户提供良好的服务”。然而，一个幼稚的项目删除策略（如标准的繁文缛节或二出一进倡议中提出的）是否是唯一可行的选择——或者，更好的是，如果它是一个可行的选择——来控制法律的复杂性，这一点一点也不清楚。我的愿景是，先进的网络理论、借鉴于复杂性科学和信息理论的数字工具和分析技术能够而且应该以前所未有的协同作用相结合，在法律的起草、可及性和易用性方面制定新的客观可衡量的标准。

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.