Toward a Computational Theory of Legal Complexity

Combating climate change, safeguarding democracy, regulating Artificial Intelligence: Societies worldwide are facing a deluge of urgent and fundamental challenges. Legal systems play an essential role in addressing these challenges, but many of them are struggling to respond effectively.Improving the capacity of our legal systems to handle current and future challenges requires novel tools for analyzing and monitoring legal systems. Complexity science provides a framework for developing these tools, permitting the principled and systematic study of law as a complex system—an evolving network of diverse agents that interact via adaptive, rule-based behaviors and make interdependent choices. CompLex will work toward a computational theory of legal systems as complex systems. Drawing on concepts and techniques from computer science and network science, the project will contribute the main building blocks of such a theory: multilayer maps to capture the relationships between the components of legal systems, meaningful measures characterizing their interdependencies and interactions, and mechanistic models that explain our observations and guide us in improving our systems. The methods resulting from CompLex will allow scientists, policymakers, and the general public to better understand and mitigate critical challenges faced by legal systems today—such as ensuring their robustness to attacks, their resilience to failures, and their adaptation to changing environments.CompLex builds on my pioneering work in developing the methodological toolkit for studying legal systems as complex systems, and it is enabled by my unique background, which combines expertise in law, computer science, and network science. By devising a computational framework for studying legal systems as complex systems and demonstrating its practical utility, CompLex will introduce a novel paradigm in our treatment of legal systems, catalyzing a computational complexity turn.