CompLex: legal systems through the lens of complexity science

TL;DR

This paper explores how complexity science can be applied to understand legal systems, highlighting their features as complex adaptive systems and encouraging interdisciplinary research between law and complexity science.

Contribution

It introduces the application of quantitative complexity science tools to analyze legal systems and advocates for increased cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Findings

Legal systems exhibit features of complex adaptive systems

Quantitative tools can describe and analyze legal interactions

Future research opportunities in law and complexity science

Abstract

While "complexity science" has achieved significant successes in several interdisciplinary fields such as economics and biology, it is only a very recent observation that legal systems -- from the way legal texts are drafted and connected to the rest of the corpus, up to the level of how judges and courts reach decisions under a variety of conflicting inputs -- share several features with standard Complex Adaptive Systems. This review is meant as a gentle introduction to the use of quantitative tools and techniques of complexity science to describe, analyse, and tame the complex web of human interactions that the Law is supposed to regulate. We offer an overview of the main directions of research undertaken so far as well as an outlook for future research, and we argue that statistical physicists and complexity scientists should not ignore the opportunities offered by the cross-fertilisation between legal scholarship and complex-systems modelling.