Jurisprudence Commons^™

Law's Complexity: A Primer, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The legal system. It rolls easily off the tongues of lawyers like a single word - the legal system - as if we all know what it means. But what is the legal system? How does it behave? What are its boundaries? What is its input and output? How will it look in one year? In ten years? How should we use it to make change in some other aspect of social life? Why do answers to these questions make the legal system seem so complex? Would assembling a cogent, descriptively accurate theory of what makes the legal system complex …