A network approach to the French system of legal codes—part I: analysis of a dense network

Abstract

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices.In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system.

Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law

“…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 [20][21][22][23][24][25][26] . 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.…”

Selecting the cases that defined Europe: Complementary metrics for a network analysis

“…This originated from studies that analysed the evolution of the jurisprudence of the American Supreme Court through direct references (citations) between judgements [3]- [6]. The approach has then been applied to various national settings, ranging from the Canadian [7] to the Italian [8], the Dutch [9], and the French [10], [11] legal systems.…”

Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking

“…Typically, such models base their approach on explicit references and citations (see for example Bommarito and Katz 2010;Boulet et al 2011;Kim 2013). For our purposes, while this approach can and should play an important role for the type of system we envisage, it provides a limited picture only.…”