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

Following a successful first phase of my fellowship, this proposal has the aim of further understanding and curbing the complexity of legal systems, from a dual standpoint: on one hand, we will develop and add important features to our 'Graphie' visualisation interface, which allows users to navigate the UK legal corpus beyond the traditional purely 'textual' paradigm. On the other hand, we will deepen our theoretical investigation on what makes a legal text 'complex' -- from the point of view of how difficult it is for a generic reader to locate a piece of information hidden in a hierarchical structure (modelled as a complex network). The phases of the project entail data collection, visualisation/user experience design, theoretical modelling, and development of novel quantitative tools to assess the complexity of dynamically interacting and ever-evolving units of a network of provisions (for instance, the articles or chapters of a living Act). The 'legal complexity' problem is long-standing and hard-felt by legal scholars, practitioners, and even untrained users, and my project has the ambition to address it via an innovative and truly interdisciplinary approach, which leverages tools from complexity science as well as state-of-the-art techniques and frameworks for data visualisation. The final goal is to demonstrate that the current way legislation is produced, displayed, and offered to end-users is highly suboptimal, and that an alternative is possible. This cultural switch will rest on recent developments in network theory and complexity science, which for the first time mark a transition between 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' approaches to legal complexity.
One of the primary sources of legal complexity is the sheer volume of legal provisions in force at any given time. A rough estimate points to the existence of about 50,000,000 words of law currently in force in the UK legislative system (in comparison, there are only about 25,000 genes in the human genome) and 100,000 being produced or amended each month. Another issue concerns the way individual acts of parliament are written: the original structure as well as the subsequent amendments make it very difficult for a general reader to follow all the implications of a given provision, because multiple hops across different 'nodes' of the network are typically needed to form an exhaustive view of an act's content. The fact that legal provisions are continuously created, amended and repealed, and typically point towards other ones, either older or located elsewhere, makes the legal corpus a dynamical and highly intra-connected entity -- which is surprisingly still accessed via the same tools used for centuries: manual word searches and references to numbered paragraphs. 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, the options proposed there to curb the complexity of the corpus as a whole -- for instance in the standard Red Tape or 2-out-1-in initiatives -- are generally based on a naïve 'item-removing' strategy, which is not guaranteed at all to achieve the goal of keeping the intricacy of the law under control. Finally, a further issue contributing to the problem of legal complexity is the fact that lawyers and legal practitioners do not usually have the necessary training in complexity science and quantitative methods to be able to effect a meaningful change on the way their own professionals go about their daily business in a more efficient and rational way. My vision is that advanced network theory, digital tools and analytical techniques from Complexity Science -- as well as the creation of an interdisciplinary training programme blending law and basic science together -- should be combined in an unprecedented synergy to set new measurable standards in the drafting, accessibility, and user-friendliness of the law.