Representational Complexity in Law

Computationally represented laws should accurately model their real-world counterparts in rules-based legal compliance systems. Legal theoretical considerations, however, often complicate the task of faithful representation. One approach to this problem has been to create sophisticated models capable of representing rules of arbitrary legal complexity. An alternative approach, which we advocate in this paper, is to focus on a subset of individual legal rules which are more amenable to simplified computational representation from a legal theoretical perspective. We propose a measure of such a tendency that we term the representational complexity of a legal rule. Our approach involves a systematic examination of particular legal rules along all of the relevant dimensions of legal theoretical complexity identified by the legal scholarship. In this way, we suggest that is possible to identify discrete legal rules which are likely to be, from a legal theoretical standpoint, amenable to simpler computational representation