Managing Representational Complexity in Computational Law

Computer Assisted Legal Compliance (CALC) systems assist individuals in managing the legal constraints that govern their behavior. In a rules-based approach to CALC, legal theoretical issues complicate the task of accurately representing legal rules in computational form relative to how they actually operate in practice. We term these complicating factors the representational complexity of a rule. In this paper, we suggest that by systematically exploring the source of some of these complexities, it is possible to identify legal rules that implicate these issues to a lesser degree. After examining the theoretical sources that give rise to representational complexity, we suggest a series of principles for identifying rules that are relatively less representationally complex, and advocate a focus on rules that are strongly specified, literally applied, and administrable as a promising area of research for CALC efforts with near-term impact