Abstract
Complexity of law, although regularly denounced by both the authorities and the citizens, is a growing phenomenon. There are many reasons for this: the proliferation of norms, the multiplication of different normative sources of law or the regulations required by the evolution of our society. Under all regimes, governments have sought to reduce complexity by implementing simplification policies, one of the most effective of which has been codification, which decreases complexity by using simplifying modes of logical thinking. The dematerialisation of the law has transformed the process of its knowledge by the memorisation and the manipulation of the signs and the computer tool allowed a modelling of the law by passing from an inaccessible concrete to a handleable abstraction. New concepts such as interaction, regulation, feedback or evolution can now be grasped. The systemic approach and its methodological extension, agility, alternate theory and practice and look for relevance rather than exhaustiveness. The reticular law, another form of the modelling of law this time in the form of graphs, integrates “nodality”, or sporadic aggregations of legal relations, and offers itself as a new dimension of legal science. While it does not reduce the complexity of law, the pooling of legal and informatics knowledge opens perspectives that are only starting to be explored by proposing new configurations of the legal fields.
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Notes
- 1.
France breaks records in terms of normative inflation. Recently, the World Economic Forum ranked France 130th for a total of 144 countries relatively to the burden of government regulation, (cf. Schwab and Sala-i-Martín 2013). In 2015, the Official Journal of the French Republic published: 14758 bylaws, 3962 decrees, 109 laws and 69 ordinances.
- 2.
Report of the Government on simplification measures of the year 2003, quoted by the Public report of the Conseil d’Etat (2006).
- 3.
Decree of 11 Prairial of the Year II (30 May 1794). Lawyer at the Clermont bar then Avocat au barreau de Clermont puis Conventionnel, Couthon took an active part into the French Revolution. Sentenced to death with Saint-Just and Robespierre, he was guillotined on the 28th July 1794. Cambacérès, more discrete, will go on with its legist work.
- 4.
2014 Annual report of the Commission supérieure de codification p. 9: “Like the civil code which contains a number of articles providing an outline, codes may include liaison or guidance articles”.
- 5.
Decision 2004-505 DC 19 November 2004.
- 6.
- 7.
Report of information of M. Patrice Gélard for the Commission of laws—n° 216—“autorités administratives indépendantes 2006–2014: un bilan”.
- 8.
Cf. Conseil d’Etat, public report 2016 p. 29 et s.: Outre-mer.
- 9.
- 10.
The website service-public.fr is edited by the Direction of legal and administrative information (DILA). It got 260 million hits in 2014 (among them 40 millions on mobile phones).
- 11.
Thus, the car driver spontaneously looking for the term “voiture” (car) in the road code (960 articles i.e. 230 legislative articles and 730 regulatory articles) will find it quoted only 14 times including 3 times for “voiture à bras” (pushcart) and 1 time in the expression “voiture d’enfant” (pram). It is not even question to look for “auto”… . The legal translation of “car” is “motorized (terrestrial) vehicle” (véhicule terrestre à moteur) which is quite far from the daily language. The term “vehicle” (véhicule) is quoted 2228 times (422 in the legislative part and 1806 times in the regulatory part).
- 12.
- 13.
http://www.gouvernement.fr/action/le-choc-de-simplification: the simplification shock has been announced by François Hollande, President of the French Republic during an interview on television on March 19th, 2013.
- 14.
Law n°2003-591 of 2 July 2003 giving habilitation to the government to simplify law; Law n° 2004-1343 of 9 December 2004 relative to law simplification; Law n° 2012-387 of 22 March 2012 relative to law simplification and streamlined administrative procedure; Law n° 2013-1005 of 12 November 2013 giving habilitation to the government to simplify relationships between the administration and the citizens; Law n° 2014-1545 of 20 December 2014 relative to the simplification of the life of companies and containing various provisions of simplification and clarification of law and administrative procedures; Law n° 2015-177 of 16 February 2015 relative to modernisation and simplification of law and procedures in the areas of justice and internal affairs.
- 15.
Ordonnance n° 2015-1341 of 23 October 2015 relative to legislative provisions of the code of relationships between the public and the administration and the decree n° 2015-1342 of 23 October 2015 relative to the regulatory provisions of the same code.
- 16.
J. Picq, Report to the Prime Minister: the State in France: serve a Nation open to the world (L’État en France: servir une nation ouverte sur le monde), La Documentation française, Collection des rapports officiels, 1995 (http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports-publics/954026900/index.shtml).
- 17.
Decision n° 99-421 DC of the 16 December 1999.
- 18.
In 2008, Jean-Marc Sauve, director of the General Secretariat of the Government, organised a department of statistics and law quality, with a qualitative and quantitative assessment published on Legifrance Quality of Law but not on open access.
- 19.
The decree n° 48-800 of 10 May 1948 creating a commission in charge to study codification and simplification of legislative and regulatory texts: the presidency was ensured by the Secretary of State in charge of the public service and the administrative reform. This commission contributed to the publication of 23 codes and the elaboration of 25 other codes between 1948 and 1989.
- 20.
Decree n° 89-647 of 12 September 1989.
- 21.
Cambacérès report for the decree of 11 Prairial year II.
- 22.
One of the precepts of agile development is the simplicity or the art of maximizing the amount of work not to do (Boisvert and Trudel 2011).
- 23.
We can note the creation of the software “déCODE” developed for the redesign of the consumption code, entered into force on July 1st 2016, by A. Delliaux, co-author of the present article. This software is freely downloadable on the website of the Directorate General for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control: http://www.economie.gouv.fr/dgccrf/nouveau-code-consommation-table-concordance-telechargeable.
- 24.
The article is not an “atomic” legal entity: it is possible to define a structure infra-article (paragraph, sub-paragraph, etc.).
- 25.
The continuous improvement or kaizen (kai: change and zen: better) is one of the lean management actions: “When the issue is well understood, the improvement becomes possible” (Ohno 1989).
- 26.
An URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) s a string of characters used to identify a resource or a network. Its syntax follows the norm RFC 3986. For instance, an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is an URI allowing access to a resource (a web page) from its representation (HTML file) obtained via a protocol (http for example: http://www.google.fr).
- 27.
Codification software created for the code for local authorities in 1994 and recommended by the Circular of 30 May 1996 relative to the codification of legislative and regulatory texts. It has been used for the elaboration of 35 French legal codes and has been adapted to the international context (Cambodia, Vietnam, Marocco).
- 28.
If this method is now widely use dit was innovative in 1994.
- 29.
The reverse citations at various levels within a code could be treated in the same way.
- 30.
If we put apart the links to the book VI, which are only transposing metropolitan law to overseas law.
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Catta, É., Delliaux, A. (2019). Codification, Between Legal Complexity and Computer Science Agility. In: Boulet, R., Lajaunie, C., Mazzega, P. (eds) Law, Public Policies and Complex Systems: Networks in Action. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11506-7_2
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