Law smells: Defining and detecting problematic patterns in legal drafting

• Main Authors: COUPETTE, Corinna, HARTUNG, Dirk, BECKEDORF, Janis, BÖTHER, Maximilian, KATZ, Daniel Martin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Law; Natural language processing; Network analysis; Refactoring; Software engineering; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Science and Technology Law
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4521; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/6479/viewcontent/s10506_022_09315_w.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples—namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large ref...