Analysis of Legal References in an Emergency Legislative Setting

Each legal system is a complex network of norms and the normative citations in the texts are the legal method for referring to other parts of the same legal system diachronically (dynamically over time) or synchronically (statically) (Palmirani and Brighi 2006). Normative citations are the textual part of a legal document that refers to another legal source in the same legal system (e.g., Sect. 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 in the UK legal system) or also to other legal systems (e.g., European directives). One of the most relevant legislative techniques1 uses citations to summarize the verbosity of norms, create semantic relationships between different normative resources, or amend the original text. We can classify citations using this taxonomy: (i) internal and external to the same document; (ii) dynamic or static at a given time (e.g., London Regional Transport Act 1984 and later London Regional Transport Act 1996); (iii) citations that express semantic normative specification (extension or restriction; see also interpretation); (iv) citations for referring to an already expressed piece of text already without duplicating it (shortcut); (v) citations that semantically connect different documents under the same topic (clustering). In all these cases citations set up an interesting apparatus for analyzing a country’s legislative approach. In particular, it is possible to understand the legal drafting techniques adopted, as well as to detect anomalies in order to increase the effectiveness of normative action.