A panel (or sub-panel) of members of the House of Representatives or the Senate (or both) responsible for conducting hearings, reviewing and drafting laws, supervising and/or assisting in the management of the affairs and activities of the Chamber. In the legislative process, the structure of legislative texts is controlled by the administrative officials who draw up the rules. Therefore, the hierarchy, reference, and order within a corpus of legislative documents contain information about the content of the corpus that is less noisy and easier to analyze than its language. To unlock this information for large-scale comparative and dynamic analysis, we model a set of legislation at a given point in time as a collection of documents in accordance with the Document Object Model (DOM)32 (see SI Section 2.4 for our Domain Specific XML Schema Definition [XSD]). For each collection of documents, we associate four graphs, as shown in Fig. 1a, the formal definitions of which are given under “Modelling collections of legislative documents”. Our simplest graph is the hierarchy graph, which models the inclusion relationships between the structural elements of legal texts. This is a subgraph of the reference graph that models the inclusion and cross-reference relationships. From a network science perspective, the reference diagram is perhaps the most intuitive representation of a collection of legislative documents, and all of our other diagrams can be derived from it. The sequence diagram contains only the seqitems of the reference graph, which are connected by cross-reference edges and bidirectional sequence edges (“Modeling collections of legislative documents” introduces a parameterized definition of this graph for analytical flexibility).
Cross-reference edges are not weighted, while sequence edges have weights proportional to the distance between their ends in the non-directional version of the hierarchy graph (for example, a sequence edge between section (i-1) and section i of Chapter A weighs more than one sequence edge between section i of Chapter A and section (i+1) of Chapter B). The sequence diagram expresses how legal practitioners work with a legal text (i.e. they approach a topic through a particular rule, analyze its proximity as long as it is also hierarchically close, possibly follow a cross-reference, and then analyze the hierarchically close environment to a referenced rule). Finally, we define quotient charts based on the attributes associated with the elements of our reference charts. In these charts, all elements with the same attribute values (for example, all seqitems belonging to the same chapter) in a node and redirect the edges accordingly. Action – A bill in which the Senate or House of Representatives takes action, such as a bill or resolution. This gives an interesting first impression at the macro level, but the title titles are so general and the content of each title is so diverse (for example, the current Title 42 contains provisions on social security [Chapter 7], energy policy [Chapter 134] and aerospace activities [Chapter 155]) that it tells us little about the triggers and nature of growth, that we observe. The situation deteriorates further if one wants to compare German developments with those of the United States: Germany does not codify its federal legislation in a single official collection, but only publishes individual laws and classifies them into navigation domains (details can be found in section 1.2 of the SI).
The number of consolidated acts of more than 500 characters (about one paragraph, practically without laws with purely formal content) increased from about 1550 to more than 1800 between 1994 and 2005, was then deliberately reduced to about 1550 in 2011 and has resumed slow growth since 2011, reaching about 1600 in 2018 – so we don`t even see a monotonous growth pattern in this data. Therefore, in order to uncover the sources of the growth of the law and to compare our findings between the United States and Germany, we need to reorganize the legislative documents of both countries. The relationship between the courts and legislation is also implicated in another particular American problem. This is the extent to which the courts “take note judicially” of the law. When such notification is made, it is not necessary for a litigant to prove what the law is. All courts must be familiar with the federal laws and statutes of the state in which the action is brought. However, there are different rules on the extent to which courts take note of the legislation of other states. In some states, laws require courts to take note of these laws, while in others they must be specifically argued or proven, otherwise courts will assume that the law of the other state is identical to the decision-making or legal law of the state in which the trial is taking place.