# Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

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- [GPT Takes the Bar Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14402/) (2022)
- [Natural Language Processing in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12039/) (2023)
- [Law Informs Code: A Legal Informatics Approach to Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13020/) (2022)
- [LLM vs. Lawyers: Identifying a Subset of Summary Judgments in a Large UK Case Law Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04791/) (2024)
- [The Legislative Recipe: Syntax for Machine-Readable Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08678/) (2021)
- [Simplify Your Law: Using Information Theory to Deduplicate Legal Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00735/) (2021)
- [Aligning Language Models for Icelandic Legal Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18180/) (2025)
- [Citation-Closure Retrieval and Per-Rule Attribution for Real-World Regulatory Compliance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29742/) (2026)
- [Law Smells: Defining and Detecting Problematic Patterns in Legal Drafting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11984/) (2021)
- [A Method for Detecting Legal Article Competition for Korean Criminal Law Using a Case-augmented Mention Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11787/) (2024)
- [LLMs for Legal Subsumption in German Employment Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01734/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While a large number of informal factors influence how people interact, modern societies rely upon law as a primary mechanism to formally control human behaviour. How legal rules impact societal development depends on the interplay between two types of actors: the people who create the rules and the people to which the rules potentially apply. We hypothesise that an increasingly diverse and interconnected society might create increasingly diverse and interconnected rules, and assert that legal networks provide a useful lens through which to observe the interaction between law and society. To evaluate these propositions, we present a novel and generalizable model of statutory materials as multidimensional, time-evolving document networks. Applying this model to the federal legislation of the United States and Germany, we find impressive expansion in the size and complexity of laws over the past two and a half decades. We investigate the sources of this development using methods from network science and natural language processing. To allow for cross-country comparisons over time, we algorithmically reorganise the legislative materials of the United States and Germany into cluster families that reflect legal topics. This reorganisation reveals that the main driver behind the growth of the law in both jurisdictions is the expansion of the welfare state, backed by an expansion of the tax state.