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

Ivar R. Hannikainen, Kevin P. Tobia, Guilherme da F. C. F. Almeida, Raff Donelson, Vilius Dranseika, Markus Kneer, Niek Strohmaier, Piotr Bystranowski, Kristina Dolinina, Bartosz Janik, Sothie Keo, Eglė Lauraitytė, Alice Liefgreen, Maciej Próchnicki, Alejandro Rosas, Noel Struchiner

Cognitive Science, Volume: 45, Issue: 8

Swansea University Author: Alice Liefgreen

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DOI (Published version): 10.1111/cogs.13024

Abstract

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 count...

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Published in: Cognitive Science
ISSN: 0364-0213 1551-6709
Published: Wiley 2021
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa60565
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Abstract: 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 retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.
Keywords: Concepts; Experimental jurisprudence; Human universals; Lon Fuller; Modality; Naturallaw
College: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Issue: 8

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