  Legislators, designers of legal information systems, as well as citizens face
often problems due to the interdependence of the laws and the growing number of
references needed to interpret them. Quantifying this complexity is not an easy
task. In this paper, we introduce the "Legislation Network" as a novel approach
to address related problems. We have collected an extensive data set of a more
than 60-year old legislation corpus, as published in the Official Journal of
the European Union, and we further analysed it as a complex network, thus
gaining insight into its topological structure. Among other issues, we have
performed a temporal analysis of the evolution of the Legislation Network, as
well as a robust resilience test to assess its vulnerability under specific
cases that may lead to possible breakdowns. Results are quite promising,
showing that our approach can lead towards an enhanced explanation in respect
to the structure and evolution of legislation properties.
