CARBONDALE, Ill. -America's legal system could well collapse under its own weight, says an attorney who teaches in Southern Illinois University's School of Law.

"The pace of growth in law is going through the roof," says J.B. Ruhl, who came to the Carbondale campus in 1994 from Austin, Texas, where he was a partner in the law firm Fulbright & Jaworski.

"It's getting more complicated and top-heavy, you can't do good for any part of society without causing bad for others, and no one knows what's going on.

"When we get to the point where people can't understand the law and can't afford help to understand the law, good people will just give up and stop obeying it. When laws don't work, the reverberations are severe."

For a lawyer, Ruhl has come up with an unusual solution.

"We need to stop passing new laws every time a problem comes up," he says.

Many Americans have a gut feeling that the legal system is out of whack. But Ruhl supports his position with complexity theory, a new science used to study everything from brain cells to bank loans.

He and his brother, engineer Harold J. Ruhl Jr. of Durham, Conn., have written an article on law and complexity theory that appeared in the Winter 1997 issue of the University of California-Davis Law Review.

Complexity theory deals with systems in which lots of players do lots of things all at one time-and where everything affects everything else. It arose after advanced computers began allowing scientists to plot the paths of all those interactions.

While complexity theory is…well, complex-much of it turns on three big ideas.

The first says that the whole acts differently from its individual parts, which makes prediction of future events impossible.

The second says that when one part changes, other parts change in response; the more tightly linked the parts, the more disruptive and less predictable those added changes may become.

And the third says that because one change touches off a host of others, an unwanted result can't be undone by taking back that first change.

Systems adapting to constant change on many fronts churn out increasingly complex responses. These responses add more parts to the mix, which produces more surprises-and more problems. This sets off another set of even more complicated changes.

Each set of changes takes more effort. (It's like trying to climb stairs where each step is steeper than the last.) Eventually, the costs of change outweigh the benefits that change produces, and the whole system becomes vulnerable.

"In a sense, complexity theory is similar to economics' law of diminishing returns," Ruhl says. "But we can see it at work in more than just economics. The model it provides allows us to understand why what we observe is happening."

America's legal structure is a prime example of a complex, adaptive system, Ruhl says. It started out fairly simply with a constitution that had a few loosely defined ground rules and a lot of flexibility.

"The real turning point was the New Deal and the explicit effort to use law as a social engineering tool with a finished product-a harmonious, happy society-in mind," Ruhl says.

"I think we had to go through the New Deal to solve some of the most pressing problems we had then, but you can't ever get to the point where you solve all the problems, and you only create more problems when you try."

It's the nature of law to create winners and losers. Complexity theory shows why we can't figure out ahead of time just who they'll be-or even what the stakes are. But when we're aiming for a harmonious, happy society, a law that creates losers offends our sense of fairness. So we pass a passel of new laws to fix that-whipping up a whack of new winners and losers as we go.

"I think we have gotten to the point that we can hardly come up with a law that has mostly good effects any more," Ruhl says.

"When you look at what Congress produces now, it's an innocuous nothing, though it comes at great cost. To me, this is a bad sign."

Ruhl doesn't think we should dump all laws and start over from square one. Complexity theory says we couldn't do that even if we wanted to. Instead, he believes we should change our approach to law making.

"Sometimes, we just have to resist that urge (to pass a new law)," he says. "Maybe there's a better way to solve the problem-and maybe we'd be better off not solving it at all. Really successful systems are those that are average in performance, because that's sustainable."

If we continue heaping law upon law, however, the legal structure as we know it will collapse.

"Collapse doesn't necessarily mean chaos in the streets," Ruhl says. "What we're talking about is a reduction in the amount of infrastructure out there, a complete and fundamental change in the system that would produce a more streamlined government less involved in citizens' day-to-day lives.

"The first thing to give would be the dominant federal system, and you can sort of smell that in the air already. The 104th Congress was an avalanche of sluffing off (of complexity). People said, 'Whoa, we don't want as much central control as we have.' They are rediscovering local control and state-level solutions."

"Remember, the Roman empire collapsed, but everyone didn't die, and Roman culture continued. You still see evidence of it today. The culture and the people go on-and plenty of societies seem to be doing just fine without having nearly as much law as we do."

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