Law exists solely in and through language. Nonetheless, systematical empirical analysis of legal language has been rare. Yet, the tides are turning: After judges at various courts (including the US Supreme Court) have championed a method of analysis called corpus linguistics, the Michigan Supreme Court held in June 2016 that this method “is consistent with how courts have understood statutory interpretation.” The court illustrated how corpus analysis can benefit legal casework, thus sanctifying twenty years of previous research into the matter. The present article synthesizes this research and introduces computer-assisted legal linguistics (CAL2) as a novel approach to legal studies. Computer-supported analysis of carefully preprocessed collections of legal texts lets lawyers analyze legal semantics, language, and sociosemiotics in different working contexts (judiciary, legislature, legal academia). The article introduces the interdisciplinary CAL2 research group (www.cal2.eu), its Corpus of German Law, and other related projects that make law more transparent.
How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns whilst leaving corporate incentive structures unaltered, how eective can such legislation be? This question is vital for the ongoing debate about social enterprise forms, as recently introduced in several US states and in British Columbia, Canada. We ran a laboratory experiment with a framing likened to German corporate law which traditionally includes social standards. Our results show that a stakeholder provision, as found in both Germany and the US, cannot overcome material incentives. However, even absent incentives the stakeholder norm does not foster otherregarding behavior but slightly inhibits it instead. Our experiment thus illustrates the paramount importance of taking into account both incentives and framing eects when designing institutions. We tentatively discuss potential policy implications for social enterprise legislation and the stakeholder debate.JEL classication: A12, D01, D03, L21, M14, M52
Institut zur Erforschung von Gemeinschaftsgütern (Bonn) und Mitherausgeber von JLL (www.LanguageAndLaw.eu) und Rechts|Empirie (www.RechtsEmpirie.de), Ass.-Prof. Dr. Daniel Hürlimann ist Assistenzprofessor für Informationsrecht an der Universität St.Gallen und Herausgeber von sui generis (www.sui-generis.ch). Die Autoren danken (nicht nur, aber insbesondere) Alexander Peukert für die gemeinschaftliche Ausrichtung der Tagung "Open Access für die Rechtswissenschaft: Pflicht oder Privatsache?" im Oktober 2018, auf der dieses Sonderheft beruht (www.jurOA.de#2018), Johannes Rux für die unermüdliche, umsichtige und wohlwollende Redaktion der Beiträge, Christian Wolf und der Universitätsbibliothek Marburg für wertvolle Einblicke und die geduldige Beantwortung allzu neugieriger Fragen, sowie Ralf Schimmer und der Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) für die Möglichkeit, das Sonderheft Open Access zu veröffentlichen.
How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns whilst leaving corporate incentive structures unaltered, how e ective can such legislation be? This question is vital for the ongoing debate about social enterprise forms, as recently introduced in several US states and in British Columbia, Canada. We ran a laboratory experiment with a framing likened to German corporate law which traditionally includes social standards. Our results show that a stakeholder provision, as found in both Germany and the US, cannot overcome material incentives. However, even absent incentives the stakeholder norm does not foster otherregarding behavior but slightly inhibits it instead. Our experiment thus illustrates the paramount importance of taking into account both incentives and framing e ects when designing institutions. We tentatively discuss potential policy implications for social enterprise legislation and the stakeholder debate. JEL classi cation: A12, D01, D03, L21, M14, M52
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