Visualising EU law

It's just a thought that I had a minute ago because I am working on images in politics right now: Why not try to visualise EU law?

Earlier this morning, via the EU Law (Wordpress) blog, I came across the newly published Rules of Procedure of the European Commission.

I don't think many people outside the institutions will actually read this. It is boring. It is interlaced. As most EU law.

But the rules of procedure (or the Lisbon Treaties), if you read and understand them, produce a visual image of personalities and interactions in your mind, simplified representations of the legal provisions translated into simple pictures or simplified real-life situations.

This should be translated into visual laws.

I am not a very artistic person. That is why I cannot come up with a visual solution myself. But some of you might.

What I am thinking of is an iconographic way of re-writing pieces of law: One could use existing images or invent icons for each and every institution, procedure, document type etc. On can use arrows and other meaningful symbols to show relations of hierarchy, co-operation etc.

When one replaces major parts of existing legal text with these icons and images, one could quickly go through a law and see the connections between its parts through the same or similar visual representations. Complexity of language that is made for and by legal professionals could be reduced to images that can be understand by non-professionals.

And with a click on every image one would get an explanation explaining for what it stands, and, maybe, what other images are directly linked to this image.

Probably this is not very innovative, it must have been thought before. Probably it is not doable because it might have been used already if it was. Probably it's just a thought.