3 research outputs found
Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law
While a large number of informal factors influence how people interact,
modern societies rely upon law as a primary mechanism to formally control human
behaviour. How legal rules impact societal development depends on the interplay
between two types of actors: the people who create the rules and the people to
which the rules potentially apply. We hypothesise that an increasingly diverse
and interconnected society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected
rules, and assert that legal networks provide a useful lens through which to
observe the interaction between law and society. To evaluate these
propositions, we present a novel and generalizable model of statutory materials
as multidimensional, time-evolving document networks. Applying this model to
the federal legislation of the United States and Germany, we find impressive
expansion in the size and complexity of laws over the past two and a half
decades. We investigate the sources of this development using methods from
network science and natural language processing. To allow for cross-country
comparisons over time, we algorithmically reorganise the legislative materials
of the United States and Germany into cluster families that reflect legal
topics. This reorganisation reveals that the main driver behind the growth of
the law in both jurisdictions is the expansion of the welfare state, backed by
an expansion of the tax state.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures (main paper); 28 pages, 11 figures (supplementary
information
Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany
How do complex social systems evolve in the modern world? This question lies
at the heart of social physics, and network analysis has proven critical in
providing answers to it. In recent years, network analysis has also been used
to gain a quantitative understanding of law as a complex adaptive system, but
most research has focused on legal documents of a single type, and there exists
no unified framework for quantitative legal document analysis using network
analytical tools. Against this background, we present a comprehensive framework
for analyzing legal documents as multi-dimensional, dynamic document networks.
We demonstrate the utility of this framework by applying it to an original
dataset of statutes and regulations from two different countries, the United
States and Germany, spanning more than twenty years (1998-2019). Our framework
provides tools for assessing the size and connectivity of the legal system as
viewed through the lens of specific document collections as well as for
tracking the evolution of individual legal documents over time. Implementing
the framework for our dataset, we find that at the federal level, the United
States legal system is increasingly dominated by regulations, whereas the
German legal system remains governed by statutes. This holds regardless of
whether we measure the systems at the macro, the meso, or the micro level.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figures (main paper); 32 pages, 14 figures
(supplementary information