Complex societies and the growth of the law
Modern societies rely upon law as the primary mechanism to
control their development and manage their conflicts. Through
carefully designed rights and responsibilities, institutions and
procedures, law can enable humans to engage in increasingly
complex social and economic activities. Therefore, law plays an
important role in understanding how societies change. To explore
the interplay between law and society, we need to study how
both co-evolve over time. This requires a firm quantitative grasp
of the changes occurring in both domains. But while quantifying
societal change has been the subject of tremendous research
efforts in fields such as sociology, economics, or social physics for
many years, much less work has been done to quantify legal
change. In fact, legal scholars have traditionally regarded the law
as hardly quantifiable, and although there is no dearth of
empirical legal studies, it is only recently that researchers have
begun to apply data science methods to law. To date, there have
been relatively few quantitative works that explicitly address
legal change, and almost no scholarship exists that analyses the
time-evolving outputs of the legislative and executive branches of
national governments at scale. Unlocking these data sources for
the interdisciplinary scientific community will be crucial for
understanding how law and society interact.
Our work takes a step towards this goal. As a starting point,
we hypothesise that an increasingly diverse and interconnected
society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected
rules. Lawmakers create, modify, and delete legal rules to achieve
particular behavioural outcomes, often in an effort to respond to
perceived changes in societal needs. While earlier large-scale quantitative work focused on analysing an individual snapshot of
laws enacted by national parliaments, collections of snapshots
offer a window into the dynamic interaction between law and
society. Such collections represent complete, time-evolving
populations of statutes at the national level. Hence, no sampling
is needed for their analysis, and all changes we observe are direct
consequences of legislative activity. This feature makes
collections of nation-level statutes particularly suitable for
investigating temporal dynamics.
To preserve the intended multidimensionality of legal
document collections and explore how they change over time,
legislative corpora should be modelled as dynamic document
networks. In particular, since legal documents are carefully
organised and interlinked, their structure provides a more direct
window into their content and dynamics than their language:
Networks honour the deliberate design decisions made by the
document authors and circumvent some of the ambiguity
problems that natural language-based approaches inherently
face. In this paper, we therefore develop an informed data model
for legislative corpora, capturing the richness of legislative data
for exploration by social physics.
Adapted from Katz, D.M., Coupette, C., Beckedorf, J. et al. Complex societies and the
growth of the law. Sci Rep 10, 18737 (2020). Available at
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73623-x