Forthcoming in T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, & S. Nichols (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 3. Oxford: UK, Oxford University Press.
Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied
Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have often argued that all laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we contribute cross-cultural data to this debate: Are there essential features of law? Participants in ten different countries (N = 2844) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws—in a between-subjects design. Confirming our pre-registered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document a tendency toward legal essentialism across cultures and languages: universal beliefs about the nature of law which defy people's conception of how legal systems function in practice.
Legal philosophers have long debated whether purported laws must meet specific criteria in order to count as genuine law. Lon Fuller offered a major contribution to this debate when he proposed that legal systems necessarily observe eight procedural principles, which he called “the inner morality of law.” This chapter people’s intuitions regarding Fuller’s procedural principles, revealing limited and fickle support: Laypeople and experienced lawyers alike believed that hypothetical laws would have to abide by procedural principles (e.g. “there could be no retrospective laws”) that actual laws often violate (e.g. “there are laws that are retrospective”). The studies not only demonstrate the ease with which people oscillate between contrasting views about the nature of law, they also illustrate how experimental methods can shed light on long-standing questions at the heart of jurisprudence.
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