Seven legal systems, placed by where each keeps its answers

All seven answer all twenty of these everyday questions. What differs is where each keeps the answer: in the code, in a statute beside it, or with the courts. That gives every system a twenty-place profile, and two of them sit close together here when their profiles match. It is a map of how law is written down, not of how much of it there is — and nothing on it is placed by hand.

Every pair, as a number

The same twenty-one measurements the map is drawn from, before they were flattened into a picture. Select a cell for the pair.

What the two directions are made of

The map has no axes of its own — it is a projection, and it could be rotated without changing a single distance. But the spread along each direction is driven by particular problems, and naming them is more useful than labelling the axes with a guess. These are the problems on which the systems most sharply part company about where the answer belongs.

How this was measured, and what it is not

Three of the steps below are choices rather than facts. They are written out because a map like this is only worth reading if you can see what would move it.

What counts as agreeing

Two systems are alike on a problem when they keep the answer in the same place: both in the code, or both outside it for the same recorded reason — both leaving it to the courts, or both to special legislation. Outside the code for different reasons counts as half. We also scored it the other way — in the code or not, reasons ignored — and it moves three of the twenty-one pairs, by at most 0.08. The picture does not change, so there is no toggle for it.

What was left out

A cell where the provision exists in the corpus and nobody has written the page yet is dropped from that pair rather than scored. It is a fact about this site, not about the legal system, and folding our own backlog into a measurement of law would be a quiet lie. Every pair shows how many of the twenty it was scored on.

What the flattening costs

The profiles have twenty dimensions and the page has two. The placement is classical multidimensional scaling, not a force layout, so the distances are the measurement rather than an illustration of it — but they are an approximation, and the two directions carry 77% of the spread. On the twenty-one pairs, a drawn distance is out by 0.11 on average and by 0.33 at worst, against distances that run from 0.22 to 0.87. Both axes are drawn to one scale; the picture is never stretched to fill the frame.

What this does not measure

Not the similarity of legal systems, and above all not how much law a place has. Every one of these seven answers every one of these twenty problems. England and Wales fills nine of the twenty cells and answers all twenty — the rest is negligence, private nuisance, Rylands v Fletcher, abatement, a common-law debt: law that is decided rather than enacted, and so has no article to quote. Reading a thin column as a thin body of law is the easiest mistake to make on this page and it would be exactly wrong. Twenty everyday disputes are also only twenty everyday disputes, and these are seven particular collections with particular holes — England is represented here by seven Acts, New York by four of its Consolidated Laws. It is not a better or a worse place to bring a claim, nothing here predicts an outcome, and there is no ordering of any kind on this page.

See the grid this is measured from →