Vertical Elaboration or Horizontal Integration? A Citation-Network Analysis of Saudi Arabian Legislation
This paper presents the first citation-network analysis of Saudi Arabian legislation using a newly released machine-readable corpus, revealing that while the system is predominantly cross-referential rather than hierarchical, its structure is highly concentrated around key instruments like the Companies Law and contains significant data quality issues such as misresolutions and citations to unrecovered repealed laws.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Laws are rarely solitary documents. A single statute rarely stands alone; instead, it leans on others for definitions, points to different rules for procedures, and carves out exceptions based on older texts. Over the last two decades, scholars in the United States and Europe have treated these connections as a map, using computer analysis to trace how laws refer to one another. This approach, known as legal citation network analysis, reveals which laws carry the most weight in a system and how complexity builds up over time. However, this map has remained blank for much of the Arab world. The reason is not a lack of interesting laws, but a lack of data that computers can read. For years, Saudi Arabian legislation existed only as human-readable documents in official gazettes, making it impossible to run the same kind of quantitative study. Without a machine-readable collection of laws, the intricate web of references within the Saudi legal system remained invisible to researchers.
This changed with the release of a new, carefully verified collection of Saudi laws, allowing researchers to build the first-ever citation network for the country's statutory system. The study examined 290 different legislative instruments, ranging from major laws to implementing regulations, containing nearly 16,000 individual articles. The researchers did not simply count how many times one law mentioned another; they first had to solve a tricky problem of accuracy. When a computer tries to match a reference in a text to a specific law, it often makes mistakes, confusing similar-sounding names or misidentifying the target. The team validated every single connection by hand, checking the cited name against the official title of the law it pointed to. They found that the computer had misidentified the target in about 3 percent of cases. By removing these errors, they were left with a clean network of 410 verified references, which they then used to answer a fundamental question: is the Saudi legal system a strict hierarchy, or is it a deeply integrated web?
The answer turned out to be a mix of both, but with a surprising twist. In many legal systems, a main law is followed by a set of regulations that explain how to apply it. These regulations naturally cite their parent law, creating a vertical chain of command. If the Saudi system were purely hierarchical, most references would stay within these parent-child pairs. Instead, the researchers found that between 70 and 74 percent of the references crossed between different families of laws. This means the system is genuinely cross-referential; a law on one topic frequently relies on rules from a completely different topic. The network is sparse, meaning most laws do not cite each other directly, but it is also highly connected, with nearly every law that cites another being part of one giant, linked group.
Within this web, certain laws act as major hubs, drawing references from many others. The most prominent is the Companies Law, which received citations from 26 different instruments. It stands alone as the central pillar of the system, far outpacing other major statutes. The Labour Law, which initially appeared to be a rival hub, was revealed to be less central once the researchers correctly separated references from its own annexes and regulations from references coming from outside its family. Once these internal references were filtered out, the Labour Law's influence dropped significantly, leaving the Companies Law as the undisputed leader. The study also highlighted a difference between how often a law is cited and how widely it is cited. The Capital Market Law was cited frequently, but only by a small group of financial laws. In contrast, the Criminal Procedure Law was cited by many different types of laws, showing it provides a general mechanism needed across the entire system.
Beyond mapping the structure, the researchers used this network to find specific maintenance problems. They compared the citation map against a separate list of laws that had been repealed or replaced. This comparison uncovered live laws that still point to rules that no longer exist. For example, certain environmental regulations were found to direct readers to a penalty system that had been superseded, and a residency law referenced a civil service code that had been entirely replaced. While the number of these errors found was small, the method proved that such defects can now be detected at scale. The study also identified a list of 128 distinct instruments that Saudi laws rely on but which are not yet available in a machine-readable format. These missing pieces, which include pension rules and internal committee guidelines, represent the next priority for building a complete digital library of Saudi law.
The findings offer a clear picture of a legal system that is far more interconnected than a simple hierarchy suggests. By separating the vertical links of parent and child from the horizontal links between different fields, the researchers corrected a potential misreading of the system's structure. The results show that the Saudi legal system is not just a stack of regulations, but a complex, cross-referential network where commercial and procedural laws play the most critical roles in holding the system together. This analysis was only possible because a new, high-quality dataset became available, proving that the same kind of deep structural understanding previously reserved for Western legal systems can now be applied to the laws of Saudi Arabia.
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