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

Thanks a lot for the generous and lovely review @izaskoczen.bsky.social !!

Generous PhD funding at Surrey (SCLP applicants eligible) - fees and stipend (£20,780 per annum). Do share widely! Deadline is April 4, start date Oct 2026. www.surrey.ac.uk/fees-and-fun...

Almeida on Dual Character Concepts, buff.ly/QjZqcuZ - Guilherme Almeida has posted A Defense of Dual Character Concepts in Legal Philosophy and Beyond on SSRN.

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/

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

This is a job in political theory/philosophy that is specifically for someone interested in empirical work. Looks perfect for folks doing experimental philosophy

oh wow wow wow. Wow. It's officially out, after many years: "Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning" authors.elsevier.com/c/1k~vV_Ebvv... Read on for a brief summary, but I encourage you to read the thing itself.

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.

The long awaited results of the Brazilian Reproducibility Network are in! Their final sample consists of 97 replications of 47 studies. The only coherent measure of replication, p<.05, shows a replication rate of 19%. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

📢 New publication by Piotr Bystranowski from INCET in open access: "Self-absorbed, yet interesting? A bibliometric study on general jurisprudence" journals.openedition.org/revus/10886

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....

Our incredibly short (5 page) paper on intuitions about consent — with Joanna Demaree-Cotton and @rosesomm.bsky.social We find cases where people agree that both: (a) There’s a sense in a which a person clearly consented (b) In deeper sense, she did not consent at all osf.io/63d8s

New study with Joanna Demaree-Cotton and Josh Knobe!

Abstracts due this Saturday!

New paper led by Priscila Andrade investigating different theories about precedent. bit.ly/4hH6QpJ Whether the law has changed with a new decision depends on your concept of precedent. When facts are the same and the outcome differs, the law has changed, but what about other combinations?

My piece yesterday in Aeon: a 3000-word "love song for philosophy", arguing that the our species' capacity to wonder philosophically, even when we make no progress toward answers, is the most intrinsically awesome thing about planet Earth. Philosophy needs no other excuse. aeon.co/essays/if-yo...

Does reflecting on the consequences of real-world controversies shift moral opinions? Does it lead to progress or, at least, consensus? Find out in our @cogscisociety.bsky.social blog post: cognitivesciencesociety.org/consequences... w/ P. Bystranowski, I. Hannikainen & J. Rueda

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

The 2025 Euro #Xphi conference has just been announced for July 10-12 at University of East Anglia. The subfield is very friendly and supportive, and so I highly recommend the conference, especially if you are just starting out your empirical journey x-phi.uea.ac.uk/EuroX-Phi202... #philsky

Blueksy! I will be recruiting a PhD student and a lab manager in the Fall of 2025. The lab will study rules and curiosity from a moral psychology lens—exploring how we judge rule-breakers, reason about rules, and what sparks our curiosity in the moral domain.

X-Jur has arrived -

Amazing work led by @neeleengelmann.bsky.social. Super proud to be a part of it!!

Torcendo pra essa rede pegar!

'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.

New experimental jurisprudence result: People are drawn to an extreme version of the natural law’ thesis If a behavior is morally wrong, then even if there’s no statute banning it, people think there’s a sense in which it is unlawful (!) www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Updated pre-print (arxiv.org/abs/2308.01264) testing moral and legal intuitions in GPT-4, Claude 2.1, Llama 2, and Gemini Pro across a series of different studies. We found that...

New study from @almeida2808.bsky.social looks at intuitions about textualism vs. purposivism in philosophy of law -- and finds this same pattern It is not: some people are textualists, others are purposivists. It is: each person has both textualist and purposivist intuitions bit.ly/3uxRO2m

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.

Why do we find opposing intuitions about philosophical questions? I argue that recent results suggest a new picture: - It’s mostly NOT about different people having different intuitions - It’s about individual people having CONFLICTING INTUITIONS philpapers.org/archive/JOSC...

Happy to share joint work with @almeida2808.bsky.social, Felipe Oliveira, Karolina Prochownik, Ivar Hannikainen, Noel Struchiner and Stefan Magen: "Is there a duty to apply immoral laws?" 👩‍⚖️ tl;dr: It's a big NO 🙅‍♀️from people, both laypeople and those with some legal training.

How well does GPT4 align with humans in terms of moral and legal reasoning? We (w @joseluiz.bsky.social et al) ran eight studies to compare them, finding that there are ways in which both are strikingly similar, but also several systematic differences. Check it out: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01264