Measuring Complexity of Legislation. A Systems Engineering Approach

Abstract

Complexity management is a well-understood concept in systems engineering with strong theoretical and practical foundations. The complexity of legal systems, however, is mainly considered in trade or tax context and remains largely qualitative in nature. Since the ability to create, develop and follow law is crucial to functioning of a society, a quantitative method for assessing the complexity of a set of laws from both its creation and consumption perspective and development of that complexity over time would be beneficial. For example, such a measure could be used to assess the sustainability of a legal system, develop “complexity budgets” for legislative texts and quantitatively measure the impact of changes. In this paper, the authors utilise a complexity measure for engineering systems in the legal context of the Republic of Estonia. A specific measure of legal complexity is developed based on ideas from systems engineering and morphological analysis. It is then applied to time series of quarterly sets of Estonian legislation from 2002 to 2019. The research shows that systems engineering approach does yield meaningful results in the legal domain and that, assuming limited cognitive capabilities, the existing trend of complexity growth is not sustainable. Policy recommendations are presented to change the trend found.