Why Is Law so Complex

Why Is Law so Complex

Throughout the case, more time is needed to read and analyze. After determining that it was too complex, the show`s contestants suggested that the Law Commission clarify it, but Anderson compared the task to the Works of Hercules. Codification is ideal, but it will not happen. The government`s priorities are not necessarily the priorities of legal clarification. It is an interesting debate, but there seems to be a lot of discussion, but not much that needs to be done to address the recognized complexity that causes problems and costs for individuals and businesses. Katz, D. M. & Bommarito, M. J. Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code. Artif. Intell. Law 22, 337-374 (2014).

Ruhl, J. B., Katz, D. M. & Bommarito, M. J. Using legal complexity. Science 355, 1377-1378 (2017). While there are many ways to measure complexity, Katz and Bommarito focused on finding rules and assimilating rules, which are, respectively, “How complex is the task of determining the rule or set of rules applicable to the behavior in question?” and “How complex is the process of assimilating the informational content of a set of rules?” While there are many other ways to measure legal complexity, such as the cost of complying with laws, they chose to limit their investigation to the difficulty of understanding this legal code. But how complicated are our laws? Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito of Michigan State University recently set out to measure exactly that in a discussion paper titled “Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The Code of the United States.” They tried to quantitatively measure the complexity of the U.S. Code using about one measure to determine how difficult it is to understand it. The United States Code is essentially the collection of all federal statutes and consists of 51 headings or sections, each dealing with different subjects. For example, Title 11 refers to bankruptcy, Title 26 refers to our tax legislation and Title 39 refers to our postal service.

Since there are many sections with different topics and styles, comparing the complexity of different titles is a natural way to examine the different legal complexities. But how does it work? Lee, B., Lee, K.-M. & Yang, J.-S. The structure of the network reveals models of legal complexity in human society: the case of the constitutional network. PLOS UN 14, 1-15. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209844 (2019). An intriguing next step would be to see the complexity of the various titles, as well as the entire US code, change over time. But even without that, it`s amazing how different and complex our federal laws are. I recommend reading the full document; It`s a great read.

It has been said that the courts are overmanaged. Life is subtle and complicated. Lawyers are used to convince a judge that it is possible to do something that has never been done before. Lawyers do their job and their clients go to people who are trained in dialectical arguments, which creates complexity in the system. Regular reforms are needed to clean up the system. The scope of the law means that it is not sufficiently scrutinized and, therefore, complexity is not the fault of lawyers. The world is really complex. The simpler your legal system, the more erroneous it becomes. The law must be complex. Example: Simple version of the law – it is illegal to steal. Okay, a guy picks a flower from someone else`s garden.

Did he steal it? And is it the same as the guy who took a BMW that didn`t belong to him? It can be frustrating, even for lawyers, that laws are so long and complex. But shorter laws would inevitably lead to additional loopholes, ambiguities, and unintended consequences – like the one that led to the friend`s loophole in the first place. Modern societies rely on law as the main mechanism to control their development and manage their conflicts. Through carefully designed rights and duties, institutions and procedures, the law can enable people to engage in increasingly complex social and economic activities. Therefore, law plays an important role in understanding how societies change. To explore the interaction between law and society, we need to look at how the two evolve over time. This requires a reliable quantitative understanding of the changes taking place in both areas. But while the quantification of societal changes has been the subject of enormous research efforts for many years in fields such as sociology, economics or social physics1,2,3,4,5,6, much less work has been done to quantify legal change. In fact, lawyers have traditionally viewed the law as barely quantifiable, and while there is no shortage of empirical legal studies,7,8,9 researchers have only recently begun to apply data science methods to law.10,11,12,13 To date, there is relatively little quantitative work that explicitly addresses legal changes,14,15,16,17,18,19 and there is almost no science that analyzes the evolving outcomes of the legislative and executive branches of national governments on a large scale.

Making these data sources accessible to the interdisciplinary scientific community will be crucial to understanding how law and society interact. But even if you`re only looking at that kind of complexity, there are many ways to investigate it. For example, the more closely a section of the law is linked, the more difficult it is to truly assimilate and understand the effects of the law. Here`s a look at a particularly interconnected section, a brief section of the U.S. Code dealing with the Alaska Railroad: More serious politicians on both parties recognize that complex issues — such as health care, taxes, and national security — need to be addressed in detail. But it is always reasonable to ask why so many laws seem so long. Rosvall, M. & Bergstrom, C. T. Maps of random walks in complex networks show the structure of the community.

PNAS 105, 1118-1123 (2008). So what were the most complex sections of the U.S. Code? Based on their classification, Title 42 (Public Health and Well-being) appears to be the most complex and interdependent, as does the Internal Revenue Code or Title 26. Which shouldn`t surprise anyone who has tried to pay their taxes. However, the increase in the number of hierarchical elements or the number of references also tends to be correlated with a decrease in airworthiness, as this may indicate fragmentation of content: those trying to understand a legal norm will more often be forced to combine information from several places in the law to obtain a complete picture of its content. This difficulty is only exacerbated by dominant legal information systems, which often require users to click on hierarchies of legal elements and rarely allow them to display a personalized selection of organizational units in a single browser tab for shared appreciation. As a result, our statistics for both countries support the intuition that their legislative apparatuses are also becoming increasingly complex – although the increase in complexity is due to different design decisions in the two jurisdictions. While the difference between the editorial styles of legislation is of natural interest to comparative jurisprudence, the common trend of growth that we observe raises a broader question: what is the source? While many informal factors influence how people interact, modern societies rely on law as the primary mechanism to formally control human behavior.

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