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

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 In reality, legal provisions are continuously created, amended and repealed, and typically point towards other ones, either older or located elsewhere, making the legal corpus a dynamical and highly intra-connected entity.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.

A positive outcome of my project will attract considerable attention from and prove highly beneficial to a wide array of stakeholders. First and foremost, policy-makers, MPs and parliamentary officers will be offered an innovative set of digital and quantitative tools that should radically change the way they approach the drafting phase of a new bill and the planning phase of interventions (amendments/repeals) on existing ones. My ambition is that - by the end of the Fellowship - the new visualization interface developed by my team is made available (if only as a prototype) on the official government website legislation.gov.uk. The superiority of this tool in terms of user experience with respect to the currently available 'text-only' option should rapidly trigger more initiatives aimed at charting broader sectors of the legislation. After an initial training phase, the individuals responsible for making and keeping the law alive will reach a deeper level of awareness on the importance of considering - right at the beginning of the legislative process - 'complexity' and 'structural' issues from a 'visual' and 'quantitative' standpoint too, this way addressing in very concrete and practical terms a key societal issue of our times. The flexible and long-term nature of this Fellowship will give me enough time to familiarize with the most practical aspects of how the UK legislative process currently works and to gather unique insights into practical ways to reduce its intricacy, thanks to dedicated training activities detailed in my P2I, and to regular channels for discussion and interaction with this specific category of stakeholders that my enterprise will open.
The idea of producing navigable digital charts of the UK laws within a network-based framework should also be very appealing to startups and enterprises operating in the fast-growing LawTech sector: I am certainly eager to explore with some of them the possibility to apply the same concept and vision as an aid for private and commercial transactions. Indeed, the same philosophy and underlying methodology could well be adapted to the digitalisation and visualisation of private contracts and other legally binding documents in the private sector, whose complete oversight with traditional methods is hindered by their sheer volume, size, or inherent intricacy. I have planned a series of short visits to London-based startups (named in the JoR), as well as invitations to the one-day launch event (as detailed in the P2I) to encourage a faster and more widespread uptake of my project's outputs by this community. In terms of economic impact, an increased level of clarity and transparency of legal provisions, as well as the generalised adoption of network-based visualisation tools and complexity indicators among private-sector stakeholders is expected - within a time-horizon of roughly ten years - to generate savings for the UK economy in the range of hundreds of millions of Pounds (see P2I for details).
The visualization interface and the 'digital laboratory' will also offer an invaluable support tool to legal practitioners and end-users from the general public who may be occasionally interested in consulting the law (for instance, due to their involvement in litigation), as well as secondary beneficiaries - such as groups lobbying for sector-specific changes in the law. The introduction of the new digital framework I am advocating will promote a cultural shift in the UK society, eliminating the most frustrating aspects in the accessibility of services, which usually constitute a primary source of distrust towards the government and public offices. My planned dissemination activities (detailed in the P2I) intend to demonstrate that their institutional mission to serve the needs of the population can be best accomplished by playing the role of true 'innovation engines', this way improving the public perception and the quality of services they provide.