Taming the complexity of the law: modelling and visualisation of dynamically interacting legal systems [RENEWAL].

驾驭法律的复杂性：动态交互的法律系统的建模和可视化[RENEWAL]。

• 批准号: MR/X023028/1
• 负责人: Pierpaolo Vivo
• 金额: $ 75.67万
• 依托单位: King's College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FX023028%2F1
• 关键词: Taming; complexity; law; modelling; visualisation

Following a successful first phase of my fellowship, this proposal has the aim of further understanding and curbing the complexity of legal systems, from a dual standpoint: on one hand, we will develop and add important features to our 'Graphie' visualisation interface, which allows users to navigate the UK legal corpus beyond the traditional purely 'textual' paradigm. On the other hand, we will deepen our theoretical investigation on what makes a legal text 'complex' -- from the point of view of how difficult it is for a generic reader to locate a piece of information hidden in a hierarchical structure (modelled as a complex network). The phases of the project entail data collection, visualisation/user experience design, theoretical modelling, and development of novel quantitative tools to assess the complexity of dynamically interacting and ever-evolving units of a network of provisions (for instance, the articles or chapters of a living Act). The 'legal complexity' problem is long-standing and hard-felt by legal scholars, practitioners, and even untrained users, and my project has the ambition to address it via an innovative and truly interdisciplinary approach, which leverages tools from complexity science as well as state-of-the-art techniques and frameworks for data visualisation. The final goal is to demonstrate that the current way legislation is produced, displayed, and offered to end-users is highly suboptimal, and that an alternative is possible. This cultural switch will rest on recent developments in network theory and complexity science, which for the first time mark a transition between 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' approaches to legal complexity.One of the primary sources of legal complexity is the sheer volume of legal provisions in force at any given time. A rough estimate points to the existence of about 50,000,000 words of law currently in force in the UK legislative system (in comparison, there are only about 25,000 genes in the human genome) and 100,000 being produced or amended each month. Another issue concerns the way individual acts of parliament are written: the original structure as well as the subsequent amendments make it very difficult for a general reader to follow all the implications of a given provision, because multiple hops across different 'nodes' of the network are typically needed to form an exhaustive view of an act's content. The fact that legal provisions are continuously created, amended and repealed, and typically point towards other ones, either older or located elsewhere, makes the legal corpus a dynamical and highly intra-connected entity -- which is surprisingly still accessed via the same tools used for centuries: manual word searches and references to numbered paragraphs. In 2013, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launched the ''Good law" initiative "with a shared objective of making legislation work well for the users of today and tomorrow". However, the options proposed there to curb the complexity of the corpus as a whole -- for instance in the standard Red Tape or 2-out-1-in initiatives -- are generally based on a naïve 'item-removing' strategy, which is not guaranteed at all to achieve the goal of keeping the intricacy of the law under control. Finally, a further issue contributing to the problem of legal complexity is the fact that lawyers and legal practitioners do not usually have the necessary training in complexity science and quantitative methods to be able to effect a meaningful change on the way their own professionals go about their daily business in a more efficient and rational way. My vision is that advanced network theory, digital tools and analytical techniques from Complexity Science -- as well as the creation of an interdisciplinary training programme blending law and basic science together -- should be combined in an unprecedented synergy to set new measurable standards in the drafting, accessibility, and user-friendliness of the law.

从我的奖学金的成功第一阶段之后，该提案的目的是从双重角度进一步理解和遏制法律系统的复杂性：一方面，我们将在“ Graphie”可视化界面中开发并添加重要功能，该功能使用户可以使英国法律语料库在传统的纯粹纯粹的“文本”范式之外导航。另一方面，我们将加深理论投资对使法律文本“复杂”的原因加深的 - 从通用读取器找到隐藏在层次结构中（建模为复杂网络）中的信息有多困难。该项目的阶段需要数据收集，可视化/用户体验设计，理论建模以及新型定量工具的开发，以评估动态相互作用和不断发展的规定单位的复杂性（例如，生活法案的文章或章节）。 “法律复杂性”问题是由法律学者，从业者甚至未训练的用户长期努力的，我的项目有雄心勃勃的野心，可以通过一种创新且真正的跨学科方法来解决它，从而利用复杂性科学以及最新的技术和框架来可视化的工具。最终的目标是证明当前的立法制作，展示和提供给最终用户的方式是高度最佳的，并且可以做出替代方案。这种文化转变将取决于网络理论和复杂性科学的最新发展，这首先标志着“定性”和“定量”的法律复杂性之间的过渡。一个粗略的估计值是，英国立法系统目前有大约50,000,000个法律单词（相比之下，人类基因组中只有大约25,000个基因），每月生产或修改100,000个。另一个问题是涉及议会的单个行为的书面方式：原始结构以及随后的修正案使一般读者很难遵循给定规定的所有含义，因为通常需要在网络的不同“节点”上形成对ACT内容的详尽观点的多个啤酒花。法律规定是不断创建，修改和重复的，通常指向其他较老或位于其他地方的事实，使法律语料库成为一个动态且高度高度的连接实体 - 令人惊讶的是，这是通过使用数百年来使用的相同工具来访问的：手动词搜索和参考文献，并参考了编号编号。 2013年，议会律师办公室启动了“良好法律”倡议，其共同目标是使立法对当今和明天的用户良好。但是，在那里提出的选项遏制了整个语料库的复杂性（例如，在标准的繁文tape节或2-In-1-In计划中）通常是基于一种幼稚的“项目避免”策略，这根本不能保证实现控制法律的复杂性的目标。最后，有助于法律复杂性问题的另一个问题是，律师和法律从业人员通常没有对复杂性科学和定量方法进行必要的培训，以便能够以更有效和理性的方式对自己的专业人员进行日常业务的方式实现有意义的变化。我的愿景是，应将跨学科的培训计划与基础科学融合在一起的高级网络理论，数字工具和分析技术，以及建立跨学科培训计划，以空前的协同作用结合起来，以在法律的起草，可及性，可及性和用户友好性中建立新的可衡量标准。