Network Analysis of the French Environmental Code

Abstract

Abstract.We perform a detailed analysis of the network constituted by the citations in a legal code, we search for hidden structures and properties. The graph associated to the Environmental code has a small-world structure and it is partitioned in several hidden communities of articles that only partially coincide with the organization of the code as given by its table of content. Several articles are also connected with a low number of articles but are intermediate between large communities. The structure of the Environmental Code is contrasting with the reference network of all the French Legal Codes that presents a rich-club of ten codes very central to the whole French legal system, but no small-world property. This comparison shows that the structural properties of the reference network associated to a legal system strongly depends on the scale and granularity of the analysis, as is the case for many complex systems.

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“…Our work contributes to both the broader literature on legal complexity [24][25][26][27] and efforts to document the physical properties of legal systems as complex adaptive systems [28][29][30][31][32][33]. In addition, this paper is among a growing set of recent works applying tools of machine learning and natural language processing to better understand the behavior of various legal systems [34][35][36].…”

Creating Context Networks in Dutch Legislation

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“…[3] [9]). The work on legislation however focused on analysing the entire network at the level of laws [5] or within one specific law [1]. We are looking for a small local network at a more detailed level (e.g.…”

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“…This has allowed scholars to measure legal complexity in terms of intertextuality, providing an approximate picture of the amount of cross-references that legal professionals must handle to have a proper knowledge of any regulated domain. [4,5] have proposed an analysis of the citation network of the US supreme court and [8] has analyzed the United States code as a network; [1] do a similar analysis of the network of the citations in the French environmental code.…”