About The Workshop
SW 32-Social Epistemology and Law
Convenors: Juan José Iniesta Delgado-Triantafyllos Gkouvas
Contact: jiniesta@um.es ; t.gkouvas@um.es.
The overarching aim of this special workshop is to explore the contribution of social epistemology to legal theory and legal practice. More specifically, the workshop approaches legal knowledge from a functional perspective, asking how social epistemology can illuminate the conditions under which legal knowledge enables law to fulfil its characteristic functions. A program of social epistemology applied to law seeks to analyze how social factors shape the production, representation, justification, transmission, and distribution of legal knowledge. This approach rests on the assumption that legal knowledge is not merely an individual cognitive achievement, but a social product whose relevance is inseparable from the social and institutional functions it is expected to perform.
From this perspective, social epistemology of law operates in a primarily descriptive mode, drawing on descriptive theses from legal theory (What is law? What determines the content of law?), epistemology (What is knowledge? What is truth? What counts as justification?), and the sociology of knowledge (How is knowledge transmitted, stabilized, and contested within social practices?). Central questions concern the social conditions under which legal knowledge is acquired, transmitted, and relied upon, as well as the ways in which these conditions affect the capacity of legal institutions to produce reliable normative responses.
At the same time, this line of inquiry has an unavoidable normative dimension. Crucially, this normativity is not external to the analysis, but internal to the functional characterization of legal knowledge itself. If legal knowledge plays a constitutive functional role in the operation of legal systems, social arrangements and institutional practices can be evaluated in terms of how effectively they enable the acquisition, circulation, and use of such knowledge. To identify a form of legal knowledge as “functional” is already to assess it in light of normative criteria tied to the functions of law, such as orientation of conduct, predictability, coordination, and the reduction of uncertainty. This evaluative dimension extends to the assessment of the functional value attributed to adequate legal knowledge, as compared with the potential advantages sometimes associated with its absence, such as reduced conflict, lower institutional costs, or enhanced forms of social control.
This functional normativity has moral, technical, and legal components. A central notion in this regard is reliability, understood in a dual sense. On the one hand, legal knowledge must satisfy objective conditions of reliability, insofar as it is produced, transmitted, and applied through epistemically sound practices and institutions. On the other hand, reliability also has a subjective and social dimension, since legal knowledge must be capable of generating justified trust and confidence among legal subjects. Legal texts themselves—sometimes even at the constitutional level—frequently emphasize the importance of an adequate distribution of legal knowledge as a condition for the proper functioning of legal institutions. While these requirements do not usually take the form of a general duty imposed on individuals to know the law, they may instead ground institutional obligations to facilitate and promote access to legal knowledge, thereby raising the question of whether there exists, in some sense, a right to know the law.
Against this background, a wide range of issues arise concerning the formation, transmission, and distribution of legal knowledge across different domains of legal practice. These issues should not be understood as isolated or independent, but as interconnected moments within a broader epistemic–institutional circuit. This circuit encompasses legal theory (philosophical and doctrinal research, legal education), norm creation (legislative technique, mechanisms of legal change, legislative oversight), legal communication (publication practices, legal information systems, transparency regimes, dissemination of legal news), and legal practice more broadly (interactions between citizens and lawyers, judges, prosecutors, notaries, registrars, civil servants, and other legal officials). Failures or distortions at any point in this circuit may undermine the reliability, predictability, and trustworthiness of legal responses, and thereby the capacity of law to fulfil its functions.
Topics for discussion include, among others:
- Legal knowledge and the effectiveness of law
- Legal information technologies and legal information systems
- Interpretation of law, reliability, and the predictability of legal responses
- Legal training and legal literacy for non-lawyers
- Epistemic injustice and epistemic discrimination in legal contexts
- Epistemic dependence in relation to knowledge of the law
- Legislative technique and accessible legislation
- Public systems of legal information and legal protection
Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts (400–500 words) by 15 May to jiniesta@um.es and t.gkouvas@um.es. To facilitate discussion, participants are warmly encouraged to circulate a final paper by 12 June 2026.
