The Legislative Simplicity Score: An objective tool to assess the simplicity of laws in India

Complex legislation imposes significant societal costs by hindering accessibility, increasing compliance burdens, and undermining the rule of law. While plain-language initiatives are globally prevalent, the objective measurement of legislative simplicity is understudied, and as such, remains a persistent challenge. This paper introduces the Legislative Simplicity Score (LSS), a novel quantitative framework designed to systematically evaluate the simplicity of primary legislation. The LSS is based on three premises: that legislation is formulaic, that the simplicity or complexity of legislation is amenable to objective assessment, and that legislation is a node in a macro-legal network as well as a micro-network in and of itself. These premises enable the LSS to assess simplicity across three fundamental dimensions: textual simplicity (linguistic clarity and readability), structural simplicity (organizational coherence), and, positional/interactive simplicity. This third dimension, grounded in the premise of legislation as a multi-scalar network, assesses how clearly an Act defines its relationships within the broader legal ecosystem and the coherence of its own internal systemic design. Comprising twenty-seven distinct metrics–including ratios, numbers, and binaries–the LSS draws from plain-language principles, empirical drafting observations, and concepts from network theory and complexity science. A beta application to three key regulatory statutes - the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002, the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, and the Data Protection Act, 2023 - demonstrates the LSS’s capacity to provide a scalable, comparative measure of legislative simplicity, with results aligning with perceived complexities in the Indian legal fraternity. The LSS offers a robust, empirically grounded methodology to move beyond subjective assessments, providing a transformative tool for drafters, policymakers, and researchers to enhance legislative clarity, foster greater accessibility, and strengthen the rule of law.