Network Analysis of the French Environmental Code

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the citation network within the French Environmental Code, revealing small-world properties and hidden community structures that differ from the broader legal system network.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based approach to uncover structural properties and hidden communities within a legal code, contrasting it with the entire French legal system.

Findings

The Environmental Code network exhibits small-world characteristics.

Hidden communities of articles are identified, partially aligning with the code's organization.

The broader legal network lacks small-world properties and features a central 'rich-club' structure.

Abstract

We perform a detailed analysis of the network constituted by the citations in a legal code, we search for hidden structures and properties. The graph associated to the Environmental code has a small-world structure and it is partitioned in several hidden communities of articles that only partially coincide with the organization of the code as given by its table of content. Several articles are also connected with a low number of articles but are intermediate between large communities. The structure of the Environmental Code is contrasting with the reference network of all the French Legal Codes that presents a rich-club of ten codes very central to the whole French legal system, but no small-world property. This comparison shows that the structural properties of the reference network associated to a legal system strongly depends on the scale and granularity of the analysis, as is the case for many complex systems