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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 03 2014, @04:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the ignorance-of-the-law-is-no-excuse dept.

Wired.com has an interesting story on Measuring the Complexity of the Law:

Our technological systems are becoming more complicated. In some cases, even so complicated that the experts involved in their construction don't fully understand them any more ( http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/is-technology-making-the-world-too-complex/ ). But too often, when we think about technology, we focus on certain kinds of systems: computers and large machines. But there are many other anthropic systems that might be considered technologies. And this includes our laws. Essentially, our legal codes are complicated technologies, growing and becoming more interconnected over time.

But how complicated are our laws? In a working paper titled "Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code" ( abstract at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2307352 ), Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito of Michigan State University recently set out to measure exactly that. They attempted to quantitatively measure the complexity of the United States Code, using what is roughly a metric for how hard it is to understand it. The U.S. Code is essentially the collection of all federal laws, and consists of 51 Titles, or sections, that each deal with different topics. For example, Title 11 is related to bankruptcy, Title 26 is our tax code, and Title 39 deals with our postal service. Since there are many sections with different topics and styles, comparing the complexity of different Titles is a natural means of examining differential legal complexity. But how to do so?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03 2014, @11:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03 2014, @11:09PM (#50829)

    That will also fail - you are creating a compression prize like Hutter, you'll just get new language and unparseable law (an aggressive version of what we have today).

    Why not use a Jury to test law? Assemble juries specifically to test law. If 9 out of 10 jurers came to the same conclusion on a set of positive and negative test cases as the sample judges then it's a win. Even better if they have to do it from their recollection of the body of law. What will that encourage? Readability, recallability, citizenship education, etc.

    The problem with law is that it has become it's own discipline and fails it's own tests. Ie if ignorance of the law isn't an execuse then why do Patent Lawyers exist? Or Employment Lawyers? Or Contract Lawyers?

    What should be interesting out of the complexity review will be the root cause analysis. The day a computer spits out a summary that concludes complexity in law is a function of corruption in the governance processes, is the last day computers will be allowed near a law book.