Legal Physics: Entropy and Legal Decay

By Paolina Salas '26

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Entropy Explained

In the history of physics, the concept of entropy emerged in response to the observation that combustion reactions did not utilize all the heat energy produced. Some portion of the output would inevitably be lost to friction or dissipation, ultimately reducing the overall efficiency of combustion engine systems. (1) Noting these problems, German scientist Rudolph Clausius began studying heat energy, becoming one of the founding fathers of thermodynamics. Along the way, he coined terms like entropy, which ultimately captured how and why combustion reactions were unable to utilize their energy intake fully. (2) 

Entropy refers to the phenomenon of ever-increasing randomness and chaos in nature. On a molecular level, as time progresses, more possible configurations of electrons (microstates) exist, resulting in a constant, steady trend towards disorder and unpredictability in our universe. (3) Several factors contribute to the number of possible microstates, such as the number of electrons, volume, and temperature of the area where they are contained, the phase of matter, etc. Each of these factors correlates to the motions of electrons–their speeds and directions–to influence how they move and thus, how many microstates are available to them. (4) This phenomenon explains why ice cubes melt in your drink, why hot things cool down, and ultimately, why the universe evens out its energy, by contending that chaos is the natural state of the universe. (5) In other words, left to their own devices, systems do not organize themselves; they decay. This principle is captured in the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the measure of disorder (entropy) in a system always increases over time unless counteracted by an external force. (6)

This absolute physical law extends to govern the behavior of all objects and situations in the physical world, whether they be biological organisms, chemical structures, or even systemic infrastructures. This article will explore how legal systems, like physical systems, are subject to entropy and argue that without regular infusions of interpretive, civic, or legislative “energy,” law risks collapsing under its own weight into contradiction and irrelevance. By examining how the enforcement of aging laws according to judicial precedent becomes increasingly difficult as circumstances become more variable, this article will ultimately argue that laws display a tendency to disorder and require regular reconsideration.

Law as a Physical System

While physics, as the study of matter, energy, and the fundamental forces of nature, requires that its subjects be observable and measurable within space and time, laws are abstract. As such, it is fair to question whether laws are even bound by the laws of physics. However, laws are abstract in the sense that they are not physical objects and do not exist in the same way as a tree or a building. But while abstract laws and the systems built upon them are not directly governed by physical laws, their instantiations in the physical world are. While the concepts themselves are not physical, whenever we use, express, or interact with them (by writing a legal opinion, considering the legality of our actions, or actively enforcing the law, for example), they become so. Such a relationship parallels that of the mind and the brain. While the mind, as an abstract system of thought, intention, and awareness, is not itself reducible to the physical matter of the brain, every mental act is nonetheless instantiated in real, neural processes. In the same way, legal systems depend on manifestations through courts, business practices, and our everyday actions. Therefore, no matter how abstract the principles they represent, laws’ human manifestations tend towards and accumulate contradictions, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies over time. 

Thus, while entropy may seem far removed from the legal world, legal systems are functionally entropic and require continual energy expenditure to preserve coherence. Understanding legal systems through the lens of physics lends to the idea that legal precedent, though intended to stabilize the law through consistency, is subject to the distortions of time and context. As precedents accumulate and courts project past applications to fit new facts and norms, randomness comes to play a greater role in legal outcomes as inconsistencies develop through applications of qualifications, exceptions, and judicial interpretations. 

The Stored Communications Act and Digital Disorder

One of the clearest examples of entropy in the legal system is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. Despite being almost 40 years old, this Act still governs much of today’s digital landscape. (7) When it was first developed, ECPA was an innovative, rational legal structure, designed to regulate access to electronic communications and protect citizens’ privacy. (8) But despite radical changes in digital technologies, communication norms, and data storage practices, the statute has remained largely unchanged. As a result, the legal applications of this framework must mitigate interpretive dead zones and implement judicial workarounds to make sense in modern contexts. Stretching outdated legal language to fit new realities leads to decisions that are formally grounded in the statute’s language, but substantively divorced from its intent. This creates an environment where rulings vary wildly based on judicial discretion and interpretation rather than legislative clarity. 

The Stored Communications Act (SCA), passed as Title II of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), exemplifies this inevitable drift from order to disorder as courts struggle to apply the SCA to modern forms of digital communication. (9) Under the SCA, distinct rules apply to accessing electronic data depending on whether a service provider is classified as an Electronic Communication Service (ECS) or a Remote Computing Service (RCS). (10) ECS classification applies to services that store messages and communications less than 180 days old. Accessing these datasets would require a warrant, whereas RCS classification is reserved for long-term storage services whose information can often be accessed with just a subpoena or court order. (11) With the growth of complex social media platforms, cloud storage systems, and the Internet, these distinctions are no longer mapped onto real-world use cases, and ultimately lend towards randomness of untethered judicial interpretation rather than uniformity. (12)

For example, in Jennings v Jennings, which took place in South Carolina in 2004, LeeJennings’s wife, Holly Broome, accessed her husband’s Yahoo! e-mail by correctly guessing his security questions after he had admitted having an affair with another woman. (13) Jennings sued Broome under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) for unauthorized access to his email. (14) Initially, the court dismissed the case, claiming that emails stored on Yahoo!’s servers by the user (Lee Jennings) were not in “electronic storage” by an ECS or RCS as defined by the SCA. Rather, these were personal copies retained by the user, not backups created by the service provider. As such, they would not have been subject to SCA protections that would have required a warrant or subpoena/court order. (15) However, the Appellate court later reversed this decision, claiming that Yahoo! operated as an Electronic Communication Service (ECS) by allowing users to send and receive emails and that emails remained on Yahoo!'s server so that Mr. Jennings could re-access them. (16) 

Finally, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously reversed the appellate decision—but issued three separate opinions with no majority reasoning: Justice Hearn argued emails must be backups of another copy independent of the server, Chief Justice Toal maintained that Yahoo! would have needed to have had both temporary and backup storage to be eligible for SCA protection, and Justice Pleicones viewed the two storage types as distinct each independently assuring ECS protections, but still found the emails fell into neither category and were thus unprotected. (17) Even though all three opinions reflected a narrow reading of the statute that excluded Jennings’s emails from SCA protection, their differing, even contradictory interpretations underscored confusion over SCA application. (18) 

This judicial uncertainty exemplified legal entropy: the original legal framework, once orderly, now brings variability and confusion where it was supposed to provide clarity. Just as in thermodynamic systems where molecular disorder increases with time and complexity, the changing world and increasing reliance on judicial interpretation and creativity ultimately work against legal coherence, which must be constantly and cautiously maintained. Yet, this phenomenon goes beyond the court system being outpaced by technological innovation.

Qualified Immunity and the Drift from Accountability

As social norms and political contexts shift, conflicting court rulings reveal the strain of trying to maintain coherence with contemporary values and understandings of justice and fairness. For example, the doctrine of qualified immunity, which was implemented as a protection for public officials who believed they were acting lawfully, has also drifted into disorder. (19) While originally intended to defend law enforcement in their good-faith measures to protect against civil rights violations in the post-war South, its applications no longer reflect its initial purpose.

In Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the doctrine shifted to replace the subjective good-faith standard with the objective requirement that the protection be extended to law enforcement as long as the defendant did not violate “clearly established” rights, regardless of their intentions or beliefs. (20) The undefined language of “clearly established” allowed courts to narrow their interpretation of this language to include only previously ruled upon scenarios as qualifying for the denial of quantified immunity. (21) As a result, even obvious constitutional violations are often excused if no nearly identical case exists. This leads to a paradox in which cases are dismissed for lack of precedent, which in turn prevents new precedent from being created. (22)

Without legislative energy aimed at protecting the original intent of the qualified immunity doctrine, it fell victim to entropy. By turning constitutional protections into a matter of factual happenstance, legal outcomes are detached from justice or predictability. What once aimed to ensure accountability now often obscures it, revealing a system prone to interpretive contradictions in the absence of regular recalibration. In this way, qualified immunity demonstrates how precedent, when left unexamined and unrenewed, can erode the very values it was created to uphold. 

This drift toward disorder is not due to carelessness. Rather, it's a structural outcome of legal systems’ inability to preserve order on their own. Legislative energy is the external force needed to realign the statute with current conditions. Without it, laws, along with physical systems, become distorted by interpretive efforts that start to bend under the weight of growing complexity. Without corrective energy, entropy accumulates, and the legal system responds effectively to the issues it was designed to address. Therefore, reform measures such as sunset clauses, targeted judicial review, or statutory modernization should not be viewed merely as reactive tools, but as necessary structural mechanisms for resisting systemic decay. This calls for a philosophy of legal design that acknowledges entropy as an inevitable byproduct of time and change. Just as physical systems require maintenance to prevent degradation, legal systems must be built to evolve through procedural safeguards, interpretive flexibility, and a culture of continual refinement. In this view, reform does not result from failure of law, but from critical examination and active attentiveness to it. 

Endnotes

1. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Investigations into the Efficiency of Systems at or Near Equilibrium,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120.

2. Visualizing Energy, “Maximum Efficiencies of Engines and Turbines, 1700–2000,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://visualizingenergy.org/maximum-efficiencies-of-engines-and-turbines-1700-2000/#:~:text=Thomas%20Newcomen%20(1712)%20introduced%20a,an%20efficiency%20of%20just%200.5%25.

3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Entropy,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/science/entropy-physics.

4. OpenStax, Introductory Chemistry, “Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://opentextbc.ca/introductorychemistry/chapter/entropy-and-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics.

5. Georgia Institute of Technology, “Entropy and the Second Law,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://williams.chemistry.gatech.edu/structure/dgdsdh/text_1.html.

6. Ibid., 5.

7. Bureau of Justice Assistance, “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://bja.ojp.gov/program/it/privacy-civil-liberties/authorities/statutes/1285.

8. Medina, Melissa 013, “The Stored Communications Act: An Old Statute for Modern Times,” PDF file, accessed July 14, 2025, file:///Users/paolinasalas/Downloads/Volume-63.1_Medina_file.pdf.

9. Ibid., 9.

10. Bureau of Justice Assistance, “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,” accessed July 14, 2025, https://bja.ojp.gov/program/it/privacy-civil-liberties/authorities/statutes/1285.

11. Ibid., 10.

12. Ibid.

13. Justia Law, “Jennings v. Jennings,” South Carolina Court of Appeals (2012), accessed July 14, 2025, https://law.justia.com/cases/south-carolina/supreme-court/2012/27177.html

14. Ibid., 13.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Schwartz, Johanna C. “How Qualified Immunity Fails,” Yale Law Journal, accessed July 14, 2025, https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/how-qualified-immunity-fails.

20. Ibid., 19.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.