Measuring the Complexity of the Legal Order over Time

One of the main problems in a legal order is how to manage the complexity of its changes over time. These modifications produce a very intricate network of citations in the legal order, so experts and citizens alike have serious difficulties accessing the normative content. Without countermeasures e.g., simplification policy, codification, consolidation, the evolution of the legal order over time increases the uncertainty of the normative system and of the knowledge-acquisition process. This paper provides a theoretical model based on a set of indexes for measuring the complexity of each modificatory act using explicit modifications provisions. The global measurement provides an understanding of the complexity of the legal order over time. Secondly, we produce a diagram system for visualizing these indexes of the legal order per year and per document. The model was tested on an annotated corpus the Piedmont region has recently released that contains all its legislation as open data using the XML NormeInRete standard.

[1]  David L. Levy,et al.  Applications and Limitations of Complexity Theory in Organization Theory and Strategy , 2000 .

[2]  Pompeu Casanovas,et al.  AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems , 2015, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[3]  Riccardo Guastini,et al.  Teoria e dogmatica delle fonti , 1998 .

[4]  Radboud Winkels,et al.  Creating Context Networks in Dutch Legislation , 2013 .

[5]  Radboud Winkels,et al.  Survival of the Fittest: Network Analysis of Dutch Supreme Court Cases , 2011, AICOL.

[6]  Romain Boulet,et al.  Network Analysis of the French Environmental Code , 2009, AICOL Workshops.

[7]  Monica Palmirani,et al.  Model Regularity of Legal Language in Active Modifications , 2009, AICOL Workshops.

[8]  Alessandro Mazzei,et al.  NLP-based extraction of modificatory provisions semantics , 2009, ICAIL.

[9]  Monica Palmirani,et al.  Legal Change Management with a Native XML Repository , 2009, JURIX.

[10]  Monica Palmirani.  Legislative Change Management with Akoma-Ntoso , 2011 .

[11]  Monica Palmirani.  Time Model in Normative Information Systems , 2005 .

[12]  Monica Palmirani,et al.  Time Model for Managing the Dynamic of Normative System , 2006, EGOV.

[13]  Gerald J. Miller,et al.  Handbook of strategic management , 2000 .

[14]  Armin Fuchs,et al.  Nonlinear Dynamics in Complex Systems: Theory and Applications for the Life-, Neuro- and Natural Sciences , 2012 .

[15]  Fabio Vitali,et al.  Moving in the Time: An Ontology for Identifying Legal Resources , 2008, Computable Models of the Law, Languages, Dialogues, Games, Ontologies.

[16]  Daniel Martin Katz,et al.  A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code , 2010, ArXiv.

[17]  Norberto Bobbio,et al.  Teoria generale del diritto , 1993 .

[18]  Alessandro Mazzei,et al.  Towards Semantic Interpretation of Legal Modifications through Deep Syntactic Analysis , 2008, JURIX.