| Issue |
EPL
Volume 149, Number 2, January 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 22001 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Mathematical and interdisciplinary physics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/ad99fc | |
| Published online | 02 January 2025 | |
CompLex: Legal systems through the lens of complexity science
1 Quantitative and Digital Law Lab, Department of Mathematics, King's College London - London, UK
2 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent College of Law - Chicago, IL, USA
3 CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics - Stanford, CA, USA
4 Center for Legal Technology & Data Science, Bucerius Law School - Hamburg, Germany
5 Vanderbilt University Law School - Nashville, TN, USA
Received: 2 October 2024
Accepted: 3 December 2024
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.
© 2025 The author(s)
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