Measuring the Complexity of the Legal Order over Time

One of the main problems in a legal order is how to manage the complexity of its changes over time. These modifications produce a very intricate network of citations in the legal order, so experts and citizens alike have serious difficulties accessing the normative content. Without countermeasures (e.g., simplification policy, codification, consolidation), the evolution of the legal order over time increases the uncertainty of the normative system and of the knowledge-acquisition process. This paper provides a theoretical model based on a set of indexes for measuring the complexity of each modificatory act using explicit modifications provisions. The global measurement provides an understanding of the complexity of the legal order over time. Secondly, we produce a diagram system for visualizing these indexes of the legal order per year and per document. The model was tested on an annotated corpus the Piedmont region has recently released that contains all its legislation as open data using the XML NormeInRete standard.