This panel seeks to raise awareness and start a discussion both within and outside the legal discipline on how law operates as a complex-adaptive system and what its implications are for sound science-policy advice.

It focuses on a number of correlative challenges that come with understanding law as a complex-adaptive system. In a sense, law is no different from other complex systems found in biophysical, social and technological domains, despite it traditionally being pictured doctrinally as a linear system. However, the fundamental normativity of law as a field of study poses quite unique challenges to the project of framing it in terms of complex adaptive systems.

We are proposing this panel to begin a conversation to inspire better understanding of the scope of challenge that complexity poses for the general tendency, both within and outside the legal discipline, to perceive law as a mere steering instrument that states wield to promote certain societal goals or to weed out unwanted behaviour. This image of the law is typically coupled with normative principles that see law as the primary tool of democratically elected governments to enact the will of the people through legislation and executive enforcement. However, if it is more accurate to characterise the actual behaviour of legal systems instead as complex rather than linear mechanical systems, this poses radical challenges to law’s normative ontology and complicates our understandings of the normative dimensions of law’s relationship to other complex social, economic, technological, and ecological systems with which it interacts. This lack of analytical clarity in turn undermines much science-policy advice that is currently offered to promote social changes through legal reform when such advice fails to consider the non-linear and often hidden dynamics that are at play in complex legal orders.

Considering this, we welcome contributions to the panel that will:

1) problematize the construction of law as a complex-adaptive system,

2) discuss and compare methods to analyse law’s complexity,

3) offer contextualised accounts of how complex legal systems interact with and influence the social-ecological-technological systems within which law is nested, and/or

4) how law’s complexity both influences and complicates the uses of science-policy to advise and guide intentional legal change.

Potential contributors are invited to submit abstracts to the panel organizers here: