Network analysis in the legal domain: A complex model for European Union legal sources

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. In this article, we introduce the 'Legislation Network' (LN) as a novel approach to address several quite challenging issues for identifying and quantifying the complexity inside the Legal Domain. 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 LN, 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. © The authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.