Like geographical maps that guide travelers through unfamiliar terrain, our Law Maps help users orient themselves within lengthy and complex laws and regulations. Key concepts and relationships immediately emerge from tangential information, providing an intuitive mental map of legal complexity.
Navigating Legal Complexity Through Visual Mapping
Complex legal documents present navigation challenges analogous to traversing unfamiliar physical terrain without directional aids. Law Maps address this challenge by providing visual frameworks that reveal conceptual relationships and hierarchical structures within lengthy laws and regulations, enabling users to orient themselves within legal complexity and locate relevant provisions efficiently.
Cognitive Benefits of Spatial Legal Norms
Visual representation of legal processes can enhance understanding of complicated concepts, yet remains rarely used.
Cantatore, F., & Stevens, I. (2016). Making connections: Incorporating visual learning in law subjects through mind mapping and flowcharts. Canterbury Law Review, 22, 153.
Research analyzing contemporary legal literature identified eleven archetypal diagram types for information visualization, though the overall use of visual tools in legal publications remains extremely rare.
McLachlan, S., & Webley, L. C. (2021). Visualisation of law and legal process: An opportunity missed. Information Visualization, 20(2-3), 192–204.
This scarcity represents a missed opportunity, as evidence demonstrates that visual and aural communication proves more effective than aural communication alone.
Creating Mental Models
Visual representations help users build mental models of laws and regulations by providing structural overviews that make navigation and comprehension easier. The spatial metaphor allow users to see the "terrain" of legislation and regulation, understanding which provisions are central, which are peripheral, and how different sections connect. Just as physical environments use maps, signs, paths, and landmarks for navigation, laws and regulations benefit from visual navigation tools that provide a sense of place and orientation.
Our ongoing research and development work on applying spatial/geographic-type maps to legislation and regulation visualization confirms confirms that an effective balance between complexity and simplicity can be achieved by offering multiple levels of detail — presenting summary views with the ability to drill down into specifics when needed. This hierarchical approach to visualizing legal information reduces cognitive overload while preserving the ability to access comprehensive details, making our Law Maps particularly valuable for navigating lengthy regulations where key concepts emerge from extensive tangential information.
