A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks

Mazzéga, Pierre; Bourcier, Danièle; Bourgine, Paul; Nadah, Nadia; Boulet, Romain

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-0120-5_7

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Following the work of Bourcier and Mazzega (2007b); Bommarito and Katz (2010); Boulet et al (2011); Mazzega et al (2011), we formalize the Code as a tree with more distant levels of the tree typically addressing more specific concepts. Each Title or other nonterminal element of the Code, e.g., Chapter, can be separately represented as a disjoint ''subtree''.…”

Section: Comply or Notmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There has been a significant amount of recent work on statutory citations including but not limited toBourcier and Mazzega (2007b);Bommarito and Katz (2010);Boulet et al (2011);Mazzega et al (2011).25 Of course, if an element contains no citations whatsoever, then the protocol above collapses to only the first two rules. However, given many elements of the Code do contain citations, we embed this consideration into our analysis.…”

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confidence: 97%

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Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code

Katz

Bommarito

2014

Artif Intell Law

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Einstein's razor, a corollary of Ockham's razor, is often paraphrased as follows: make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. This rule of thumb describes the challenge that designers of a legal system face-to craft simple laws that produce desired ends, but not to pursue simplicity so far as to undermine those ends. Complexity, simplicity's inverse, taxes cognition and increases the likelihood of suboptimal decisions. In addition, unnecessary legal complexity can drive a misallocation of human capital toward comprehending and complying with legal rules and away from other productive ends. While many scholars have offered descriptive accounts or theoretical models of legal complexity, most empirical research to date has been limited to simple measures of size, such as the number of pages in a bill. No extant research rigorously applies a meaningful model to real data. As a consequence, we have no reliable means to determine whether a new bill, regulation, order, or precedent substantially effects legal complexity. In this paper, we begin to address this need by developing a proposed empirical framework for measuring relative legal complexity. This framework is based on ''knowledge acquisition'', an approach at the intersection of psychology and computer science, which can take into account the structure, language, and interdependence of law. We then demonstrate the descriptive value of this framework by applying it to the U.S. Code's Titles, scoring and ranking them by their relative complexity. We measure various features of a title including its structural size, the net flow of its intra-title citations and its linguistic entropy. Our framework is flexible, intuitive, and transparent, and we offer this approach as a first step in developing a practical methodology for assessing legal complexity.

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Section: Comply or Notmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code

Katz

Bommarito

2014

Artif Intell Law

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“…To balance the institutional viewpoints on the social systems management, the democracy, interactions and organizations provide a bottom-up perspective (Espejo and Dominici, 2017). Bottom-up processes provide a new perspective of organizational systems, including nondirective approaches, to manage the complexity of social systems and the emergence of constraints in complex adaptive systems (Mazzega et al, 2011). At the WOSC 2017 congress, the local-to-political multileveled decision-making process is elaborated, focussing on the communication and decision flows to align local and political needs and political processes (Saviano et al, 2017).…”

Section: Democracy Interactions and Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial

Perko

Armenia

2018

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Cyber-systemic thinking for a smart society In a world of instant solutions, we feel sorry for not providing an easy fix for the world we are living in. In this special issue, we are trying to display some of the variety required to address the complex issues around us by connecting two complex topics: the social structures and processes and cyber-systemic thinking. The complexity and the dynamics of changes in our society are slowly being unravelled using systemic thinking, while cybernetics is used to design methods and toolsets for its sustainable management. Nevertheless, it goes far beyond that: it reveals the complexity of our existence in the Anthropocene and the need to understand the laws generating the societal dynamics to provide viable solutions for all subjects in our ecosystem.Each paper in this special issue provides valuable insights in some of our society's biggest issues and proposes cyber-systemic methods to address them. More importantly, the selected papers vary considerably, and there is no evident "file rouge" among them at first sight. The variety of research topics, methods and level of abstraction try to mimic the complexity of the observed systems. However, it is important to find the connections between the various contributions, which rationalize the application of systems thinking at different levels. It is up to the reader to discover the multiple relations among the papers and find out that they all describe a larger system, where the partial solutions can and should be reused and combined to increase the level of our understanding and hence the ability to act appropriately. After reading the papers, you may get the notion of the requisite modelling complexity to understand the properties of a viable society and the need for variety of toolset to direct its dynamics.

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“…The three types of legal ontologies have made significant progress during the past 20 years; however, few of these ontologies have gone beyond the stage of advanced and refined prototypes, scalable and ready for reuse [10]. This situation may be caused by the bottleneck and deficiency of the ontology techniques and the challenges from inner legal systems.…”

Section: Challenges For Building Legal Ontologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges and Related Issues for Building Chinese Legal Ontology

Zhang¹,

Wang

2015

Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Mechatronics, Electronic, Industrial and Control Engineering

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Legal ontologies have made significant progress during the past 20 years, however, few of these ontologies have gone beyond the stage of advanced and refined prototypes. When building legal ontology, the challenges are not only from the deficiency of the ontology techniques, but also from the inner legal systems. The paper analyzes the challenges for building Chinese legal ontology, such as the ambiguity of legal language, the deficiency of three-stage inference for court decisions and the limited role of cases in China. Based on the challenges, the proposed legal ontology should be circular ontology between normative documents and judicial cases. In addition, we discuss the issues for constructing legal ontology: the role of legal ontology, legal modules and basic elements for legal normative document.

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A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code

Measuring the complexity of the law: the United States Code

Editorial

Challenges and Related Issues for Building Chinese Legal Ontology

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