Better Organization of Legal Knowledge

The increasing need of legislatures to draft complicated statutes, e.g., the Internal Revenue Code, requires the development of new techniques for defining and communicating complicated policies both accurately and understandably. At present, these complicated statutes are expressed in long, convoluted sentences with frequent uses of exceptions and limitations. Current drafting technique, with its inadequacies, often hinders a comprehensive understanding of the policy being communicated and often fails to communicate the policy accurately. Moreover, with the voluminous increase of legal literature in recent times, legal researchers experience increasing difficulty in attempting to retrieve relevant judicial and administrative interpretations. The authors propose a technique for improving the legal communication network by clarifying its messages, making them amenable to more organized storage, and thereby simplifying their retrieval. We anticipate that this technique will encourage more accurate and understandable legal drafting and will facilitate the analysis of legal problems and the retrieval of relevant legal information