Network Analysis in the Legal Domain: A complex model for European Union legal sources

TL;DR

This paper introduces the 'Legislation Network', a complex network model analyzing over 60 years of EU legislation to understand its structure, evolution, and resilience, aiding legal interpretation and system design.

Contribution

It presents a novel network-based approach to model and analyze the EU legislative corpus, including temporal evolution and resilience assessment.

Findings

The Legislation Network reveals insights into the topological structure of EU laws.

Temporal analysis shows how legislation complexity evolves over time.

Resilience tests identify potential vulnerabilities in the legal network.

Abstract

Legislators, designers of legal information systems, as well as citizens face often problems due to the interdependence of the laws and the growing number of references needed to interpret them. Quantifying this complexity is not an easy task. In this paper, we introduce the "Legislation Network" as a novel approach to address related problems. We have collected an extensive data set of a more than 60-year old legislation corpus, as published in the Official Journal of the European Union, and we further analysed it as a complex network, thus gaining insight into its topological structure. Among other issues, we have performed a temporal analysis of the evolution of the Legislation Network, as well as a robust resilience test to assess its vulnerability under specific cases that may lead to possible breakdowns. Results are quite promising, showing that our approach can lead towards an enhanced explanation in respect to the structure and evolution of legislation properties.