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/

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...

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

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...

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.

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.

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...

Thanks for the 'highly recommended' Larry!

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

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-...

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....

In an ideal world, we would protect young people from accessing dangerous or harmful material, but increasingly, that isn't possible. That's why in our Advanced Issues in Legal Philosophy class, @lawstuff.bsky.social and I let students encounter legal positivism in a controlled, safe environment.

Empathy reveals the law’s spirit.

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

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

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.

‘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/...

Agreed.

X-Jur has arrived -

'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....

bit.ly/3SbTEgY New pre-print w/ @lawstuff.bsky.social and Ivar Hannikainen on the psychology of rule violation. We found that trait empathy is associated with purposivism. Importantly, that association happens within a shared framework, as most participants take both text and purpose into account.

Advance access version available (paywall 🙁): www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"The Burning Armchair: Can Jurisprudence be Advanced by Experiment?" I’ve written a response to Prof Kenneth Himma’s recent criticism of experimental legal theory. It’s forthcoming in Jurisprudence; I’ve posted my ‘author’s draft’ to SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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