Engraving by D.H. Friston showing a scene from the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera “Trial by Jury” shortly after its premier at the Royalty Theatre, 1875 (Image: WikiMedia Commons)

The complex system of behavioral rights, obligations, and limits we know today as our legal system probably began in early human societies as an unwritten and simple set of guides based on group moral consensus. 

As society evolved – including its need to fairly manage property rights, debt, inheritance, trade, authority, punishment, and myriad other social constructs – laws evolved too.

“In this sense, the law represents a prototypical complex adaptive system, evolving alongside other institutions to ensure that society remains stable despite increasing population size,” says Jenna Bednar, University of Michigan associate professor of political science.

Jenna is co-organizing a March working group with SFI Research Fellow Jessica Flack and SFI Faculty Chair David Krakauer to explore how key concepts from the sciences of complexity – scaling theory, social niche construction, game theory, conflict resolution, agent-based modeling, and more – might help explain and even reshape the global system of law.

In particular, says David, “legal systems represent a special case of culturally evolved robustness mechanisms, and as such, can be analyzed using many of the methods we have been developing in our study of biological systems. In this meeting one of our explicit objectives is to determine the range of utility of robustness principles.”

He says law provides a good example of what Jessica has been calling mechanisms for the separation of decision-making time scales – a nested hierarchy of decision making rules that change at slower and slower time scales to ensure that key high level features remain insensitive to noise at the lowest levels.

During the three-day meeting, representatives from all branches of complexity science, including a half dozen from SFI, will discuss with attorneys, law school professors, and other legal system experts the history and emergence of law, the cognitive and behavioral underpinnings of legal systems, how law is interpreted and acquires meaning, the capacity of legal systems to adapt and recover from abuse, and non-state alternatives to legal order.

Participants were selected for their imaginative approaches to legal research and thought, Jenna says.

She says each eld has much to offer the other and believes complexity thinking could suggest models that advance our understanding of legal systems, much as concepts from physics have recast the way economists think about markets.

“I’m hoping to send 25 people home fired up about what complexity can offer legal research and how legal research can enrich complexity,” she says. “I like to think of this as the beginning of a research program.”

The gathering is the rst time SFI has explored the research domain of law. The Kauffman Foundation is sponsoring the meeting.