Experimental Jurisprudence of Legal Interpretation: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Understanding and Applying Legal Rules

SW 58- Experimental Jurisprudence of Legal Interpretation: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Understanding and Applying Legal Rules

Convenors: Piotr Bystranowski; Ivar Hannikainen; Bartosz Janik; Karolina Prochownik; Kevin Tobia

Contact: : piotr.bystranowski@uj.edu.pl and karolina.prochownik@uj.edu.pl.

Legal interpretation plays a central role in legal theory and practice, shaping how legal rules are understood and applied across a wide range of contexts. In recent years, experimental jurisprudence has brought new data to these philosophical debates (see Almeida et al. 2025, for a review), to assess “the empirical claims and assumptions that have long pervaded even the most traditional jurisprudence” (Schauer 2025). Building on this approach, a growing body of research employs empirical tools to investigate how people—both ordinary citizens and legal professionals—understand and apply legal rules.

One line of recent research in the experimental jurisprudence of legal interpretation has examined questions of ordinary meaning, focusing on how ordinary citizens understand legal texts. Using empirical methods such as survey experiments and corpus-based analyses, this research has assessed the extent to which interpretive tools commonly used in law—such as dictionaries, interpretive canons, and corpus linguistics—track or diverge from ordinary linguistic usage (e.g., Tobia, 2020; Tobia, Slocum, & Nourse, 2022; Randall & Solan, 2025).

Another line of research has examined whether people rely on the literal meaning of a rule’s text (in line with textualism) or on the moral purpose of the rule (in line with purposivism) when deciding whether legal rules have been violated (e.g., Struchiner, Almeida, & Hannikainen, 2020). These experiments examine lay and legal-expert judgment about cases of textual and purposive conflict, such as “no vehicles in the park” (Hart 1958). This work indicates that while both moral and textual considerations matter, textual considerations are overall more important. One reason for this is that the text provides an efficient focal point facilitating coordination between different interpreters (Hannikainen et al., 2022; Bystranowski et al., 2025).

At the same time, morality has been shown to play an important role in how people reason about legal rules. For example, people’s moral evaluations of laws can affect their judgments about whether those laws should be applied (Engelmann et al., 2024). Moreover, several concepts relevant to the law—such as rule, law, and lying/perjury (Almeida et al., 2022; Almeida, 2024; Skoczeń, 2026)—have been shown to have a dual character, involving two independent criteria of categorization, one descriptive and the other normative, which may in turn affect how laws are understood and applied.

Finally, recent work has examined not only cognitive factors but also how contextual and institutional factors can stabilize the interpretation of context-sensitive expressions, including those frequently embedded in legal texts (e.g., Davies, 2024).

Taken together, these lines of research not only provide empirical data on how legal rules are understood and applied in practice but also raise important questions about how empirical findings should inform, constrain, or be integrated into existing theories of legal interpretation.

The aim of this workshop is to contribute to these research programmes and to open new avenues of inquiry. In particular, it seeks to deepen our understanding of the multifaceted phenomenon of legal interpretation by taking into account, and fostering dialogue between, a range of empirical and theoretical perspectives, including legal philosophy, experimental jurisprudence, psychology, and cognitive science.

We especially invite submissions on the following topics, as well as related areas:

• Cognitive processes underlying legal interpretation and reasoning about legal rules
• Interpretation of vague and open-textured legal terms
• Ordinary versus expert (e.g., professional lawyers, judges) interpretation of legal terms and legal rules
• The role of morality in legal interpretation
• Intuitions and biases in the application of legal rules
• Dual character concepts in law
• How children learn to understand and follow rules
• Cultural-evolutionary approaches to legal norms and institutions
• The role of contextual and institutional factors in legal interpretation
• Cross-cultural variation in legal concepts and interpretive practices
• Theoretical approaches to legal interpretation (particularly those in dialogue with empirical perspectives, including critical engagement with empirical findings)

The deadline for submissions is 1 June 2026. Submissions will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis. Prospective participants are invited to submit a title and an abstract of up to 500 words to the following email addresses: piotr.bystranowski@uj.edu.pl and karolina.prochownik@uj.edu.pl.