The Italian Civil Code Network Analysis

The regulation of private law is a focal element in the metamorphosis of society, and by gaining a broader vision of the legal domain we might grasp novel or potentially hidden nuances and characteristics. In this work, we explore the Italian Civil Code (ICC) from an unprecedented perspective based on network analysis. We develop a text processing method to identify and extract article references from the ICC and, upon these, we define network models capturing their relation structures either at a book and corpus scale. The exploitation of the main structural features of these networks leads us to unveil meaningful patterns, holding within and across the books composing the ICC. Furthermore, by leveraging a community detection task, we investigate whether the formation of a community is related to the topic coherence of its assigned articles over the portions of books involved. Our findings reveal useful indicators that may help legal experts and practitioners enhance their knowledge from a novel perspective provided by the network of article references through the ICC.