Information retrieval and structural complexity of legal trees

Abstract: We introduce a model for the retrieval of information hidden in legal texts. These are typically organised in a hierarchical (tree) structure, which a reader interested in a given provision needs to explore down to the "deepest" level (articles, clauses,...). We assess the structural complexity of legal trees by computing the mean first-passage time a random reader takes to retrieve information planted in the leaves. The reader is assumed to skim through the content of a legal text based on their interests/keywords, and be drawn towards the sought information based on keywords affinity, i.e. how well the Chapters/Section headers of the hierarchy seem to match the informational content of the leaves. Using randomly generated keyword patterns, we investigate the effect of two main features of the text -- the horizontal and vertical coherence -- on the searching time, and consider ways to validate our results using real legal texts. We obtain numerical and analytical results, the latter based on a mean-field approximation on the level of patterns, which lead to an explicit expression for the complexity of legal trees as a function of the structural parameters of the model. Policy implications of our results are briefly discussed.