What Do Law Professors Believe about Law and the Legal Academy? An Empirical Inquiry

Martínez, Eric Palacios; Tobia, Kevin

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4182521

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…A guest in muddy socks is considered to abide by the household rule—whereas a guest who tries on pristine dress shoes is not. This pattern accords with a prevailing stance among legal theorists ( 15 ): as a leading textualist scholar puts it, “texts should be taken at face value—with no implied extensions of specific texts or exceptions to general ones—even if the legislation will then have an awkward relationship to the apparent background intention or purpose that produced it.” (( 16 ), p. 428). This emphasis on text prevails also in the US court system, where textualism has grown to be a dominant theory of legal interpretation ( 17 ).…”

supporting

confidence: 55%

Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism

Hannikainen

Tobia

Almeida

et al. 2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across ( k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges.

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supporting

confidence: 55%

Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism

Hannikainen

Tobia

Almeida

et al. 2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…With regard to participants, our sample included a large number of lawyers that, according to available estimates (43,44), were broadly representative of the legal profession with regard to a number of demographic factors, including age, ethnicity, gender, years of legal experience, and type of legal employment. Analyses further revealed that our results were the same when controlling for these demographic variables in our analysis, such that we expect the results to generalize to the broader population of United States lawyers.…”

Section: Constraints On Generalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Even Lawyers Don't Like Legalese

2023

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Using the interest theory of rights and Hohfeldian taxonomy to address a gap in machine learning methods for legal document analysis

Izzidien

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Rights and duties are essential features of legal documents. Machine learning algorithms have been increasingly applied to extract information from such texts. Currently, their main focus is on named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and the classification of court cases to predict court outcome. In this paper it is argued that until the essential features of such texts are captured, their analysis can remain bottle-necked by the very technology being used to assess them. As such, the use of legal theory to identify the most pertinent dimensions of such texts is proposed. Specifically, the interest theory of rights, and the first-order Hohfeldian taxonomy of legal relations. These principal legal dimensions allow for a stratified representation of knowledge, making them ideal for the abstractions needed for machine learning. This study considers how such dimensions may be identified. To do so it implements a novel heuristic based in philosophy coupled with language models. Hohfeldian relations of ‘rights-duties’ vs. ‘privileges-no-rights’ are determined to be identifiable. Classification of each type of relation to accuracies of 92.5% is found using Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Testing is carried out on religious discrimination policy texts in the United Kingdom.

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What Do Law Professors Believe about Law and the Legal Academy? An Empirical Inquiry

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism

Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism

Even Lawyers Don't Like Legalese

Using the interest theory of rights and Hohfeldian taxonomy to address a gap in machine learning methods for legal document analysis

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