Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Abstract

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.

The experimental philosophy of law: New ways, old questions, and how not to get lost

“…More recently though, Hannikainen, Tobia, et al. (2021) reported that some of these earlier findings apply across different cultures, languages and legal systems. In the newer study, participants from a mix of 11 civil and common law countries assessed Fullerian principles either as actual statements about the laws (e.g., whether the laws violated each of the Fullerian principles) or as statements about the possible and necessary features of laws (e.g., whether the laws could violate the eight principles).…”

“…This suggests that certain intuitions about the concept of law are robust across languages, cultures, and legal systems. According to the authors, “people consistently believe that laws necessarily abide by a series of procedural principles: they could not retroactively punish past conduct, be kept secret, or be incomprehensible to most, for instance” (Hannikainen, Tobia, et al., 2021, p. 10).…”

“…In this vein, a cross‐cultural study by Hannikainen, Tobia, et al. (2021) suggested that Fuller's eight procedural principles capture people's beliefs about the essential properties of law.…”

“…29 29 See Experimental Jurisprudence Cross‐Cultural Study Swap (Hannikainen, Kneer, et al., 2021) for the first global project of this kind aimed at testing whether findings in experimental jurisprudence hold across cultures and legal systems. …”

Experimental Legal Philosophy: General Jurisprudence

“…The 2021 study sought to discover whether this response pattern would hold for a more diverse set of respondents. Whereas Donelson and Hannikainen (2020) relied on Anglophone respondents from the United States, Hannikainen et al (2021) selected speakers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and nine non-Anglophone countries. In those non-Anglophone countries, experiments were conducted in a non-English language commonly spoke in the relevant country.…”