New paper w/ Faisal Feroz, Justin Lim, and @lawstuff.bsky.social. What makes an authority legitimate? *Rules* are legitimate when they benefit their addressees, but *officials* are legitimate when they are selected according to appropriate (but not necessarily democratic) procedure. bit.ly/41LYerL

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

juris.jotwell.com/what-is-real-law/ Check out my review of the awesome paper by @lawstuff.bsky.social & @almeida2808.bsky.social, “Lawful, But Not Really: The Dual Character of the Concept of Law”. I am honored to be a contributing editor of JOTWELL, edited by profs. B Bix, K Himma and M Froomkin!

Perhaps the real ‘two tier justice’ is that the foot soldiers who do the racist tweets get jail time, whilst the lieutenants in journalism who write the racist articles and the colonels as editors who spew out the incendiary headlines, and generals who own the papers, just get lots of money.

I just posted a new pre-print where I argue that dual character concepts are something new and interesting in legal philosophy and beyond and that they can't be reduced to ambiguity, prototypes, or metalinguistic negotiations. Comments are very welcome! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Evidence of Public Acceptance of AI Law Clerks: We investigated how Kenyans evaluate the legitimacy of court decisions when judges rely on AI-generated legal research—versus that of human law clerks. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/

The rule of law or the rule of robots? Nationally representative survey evidence from Kenya

With AI now passing the bar, and with increasing court caseloads worldwide hampering access to justice, there are calls for judges to make use of chatbots to help expedite their work. Such calls po...

tandfonline.com

There was a time when the death penalty actually made people more likely to offend—at least if they were Irish; h/t Daniel Chen. See my piece in Village: villagemagazine.ie/deserting-as...

Deserting as resistance: the Easter Rising’s impact on the Western Front - Village Magazine

British military justice backfired in the case of Irish ‘Tommies’ By Brian Flanagan School history teaches that World War I’s causes were complex: Nationalism, Militarism, Imperial ambition and declin...

villagemagazine.ie

A piece in @lawsocietygazette.bsky.social discusses a report co-authored by Dr Brian Flanagan on the sitting judiciary's attitudes to the technology. Our research points toward a legal future where AI complements rather than replaces human judgment,' Dr Brian Flanagan

‘We can’t have a room of robots’: senior judges reveal thoughts on AI

Academics propose randomised controlled trial to measure effectiveness of technology.

eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

Check out the first qualitative study of judges’ views on AI in law: users.wpi.edu/~esolovey/pa... Our focus groups featured a cross-section of 12 UK judges, including 5 members of the UK Supreme Court. Co-authored with Erin Solovey and Daniel Chen.

Experimental Jurisprudence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) plato.stanford.edu/entries/expe...

Experimental Jurisprudence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Experimental jurisprudence (or “X-Jur”) addresses questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those methods…

plato.stanford.edu

Researchers who set the cat among the pigeons when they claimed to have evidence that Wikipedia was influencing judicial decision-making in Ireland have said they stand by their findings.

Fresh fuel poured on debate over Wikipedia influence on judgments

Researchers who set the cat among the pigeons when they claimed to have evidence that Wikipedia was influencing judicial decision-making in Ireland have said they stand by their findings.

irishlegal.com

As reported in the Irish Times this morning, our response to judicial critics of our Wikipedia research: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The more empathetic you are, the more you’ll prioritise a rule’s spirit over its letter.

Guilherme Almeida@almeida2808.bsky.social · last yr.

Now out @ Journal of Research in Personality (free until June): authors.elsevier.com/a/1k%7EqWL4L... We found evidence that trait empathy correlates with purposivism in rule violation judgments. Also: most people share a single concept that seems to have a dual character structure.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

New off the press, will be of particular interest to @philosophy-law.bsky.social, @lawstuff.bsky.social, @anuragdeb.bsky.social and many others link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Legislative Intent and the Hard Problem of Content - Law and Philosophy

The general aim of this paper is to investigate how philosophical problems with the notion of mental content affect the debate about legislative intent. Specifically, the aim is to define and criticiz...

link.springer.com

Thanks for the 'highly recommended' Larry!

Lawrence Solum@lsolum.bsky.social · last yr.

Flanagan on Collective Mental Action and Statutes, buff.ly/6VFlRzQ - Brian Flanagan has posted Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes on the American Journal of Jurisprudence website.

Short thread on the latest paper led by @joseluiz.bsky.social w/ @lawstuff.bsky.social: arxiv.org/abs/2503.00992 The paper addresses two issues w/ previous machine psychology papers (including our own): 1) are LLMs mastering concepts, or are they memorizing the data? 1/14

Evidence of conceptual mastery in the application of rules by Large Language Models

In this paper we leverage psychological methods to investigate LLMs' conceptual mastery in applying rules. We introduce a novel procedure to match the diversity of thought generated by LLMs to that ob...

arxiv.org

Want to know why legislating is like forgiving? And why policy preferences are of secondary importance? Check out my new paper in the American Journal of Jurisprudence - Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes (open access) academic.oup.com/ajj/advance-...

Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes

Abstract. How exactly do we know that a text is a law? This paper argues that purely legalistic explanations are inadequate because they do not explain why

academic.oup.com

New paper with @joseluiz.bsky.social and @almeida2808.bsky.social showing that AI possesses the concept of rule. We find that generative AI emulates how humans apply rules to novel situations in which a rule's letter and spirit conflict. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Empathy reveals the law’s spirit.

Nick Byrd, Ph.D.@byrdnick.com · 2y ago

Now the #ExperimentalPhilosophy Society session! @almeida2808.bsky.social presented #xJur data with @lawstuff.bsky.social and Ivar Hannikainen: "Trait #Empathy Predicts Purposivist Rule Application" Results in image #altText #openAccess preprint: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn... #xPhi #law #textualism

Disruptive passengers beware my legal analysis: www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

Ryanair seeks €15k in damages from disruptive passenger

Ryanair has said a civil action filed against a passenger is part of a zero-tolerance policy on unruly behaviour on its aircraft and it warned it will not be the last time it sues somebody for causing...

rte.ie

Wait, neither Hercules nor the snail darter existed? www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/s...

This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction

Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish.

nytimes.com

Seeing ppl talk abt the “Feb submission cycle” for law reviews, so just want to point out that no other academic field forces ppl to finish their papers in sync w graduation calendars, bc no other field delegates assessing publishability to students w 2 yrs of (often inapplicable) study.

'Looking at foreign law for support is like looking out over a crowd and picking out your friends.' Europe feels the US Supreme Court love again.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 2y ago

Kavanaugh also brings up "detransitioners," people who "regret" their decision to transition genders. Like Alito, he cites European countries that are "pulling back" from gender-affirming care for minors, saying it's a "yellow light" or "red light" for the court that Europe is "pumping the brakes."

‘A Dilemma for Proceduralist Theories of Democracy’ published open access in the American Journal of Jurisprudence today! I argue (prove) that thin accounts of democracy either exclude familiar strands of representative democracy or admit elective autocracies. doi.org/10.1093/ajj/...

A Dilemma for Proceduralist Theories of Democracy: Elected Delegates or Elected Monarchs?

Abstract. Emphasizing the intrinsic value of formal political equality, a prominent strand of democratic theory—proceduralism—sharply disassociates democra

doi.org

Agreed.

Paolo Sandro@paolosandro.bsky.social · 2y ago

Everything Tim said. I think law school assessments in Anglo-American institutions must quickly abandon coursework-type assessments and pivot (back) to in-person exams or oral examinations (like we have been doing in the European continent for ages).

X-Jur has arrived -

Mathieu Carpentier@mathieucarpentier.bsky.social · 2y ago

I couldn't help myself.

'The Rule of Law or the Rule of Robots? Nationally Representative Survey Evidence from Kenya' papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... We report a vignette-based experiment (N 2,246) which finds that judicial reliance on AI law clerks is considered no less acceptable than reliance on human ones.

Study showing Wikipedia’s influence on court judgments now published in Information Systems Research (open access): pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10....

Brian Flanagan@lawstuff.bsky.social · 3y ago

Looking forward to presenting Wikipedia research at the University of Chicago tomorrow for the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies 2023.