Seminar: The Law - An Impossible Discipline?

Judges routinely decide cases although they know full well that they only have a limited understanding of the underlying social conflict, and although they anticipate that the parties will do what they can to mislead them. How come jurisprudence as social practice is not a total failure? In the first part of the talk, I will discuss alternative psychological explanations. While these explanations are able to consistently dissolve the puzzle, their ecological validity is unconvincing. While not exogenously determined, judicial decision-making is heavily institutionally contained. Yet in the field, all elements of this rich institutional arrangement are simultaneously active. This makes it almost impossible to show the causal effect of individual institutional interventions. Large language models offer a way out. The direct object of investigation then is the delegation of judicial decision-making to algorithms (which is no longer futuristic). By analogy, one may draw cautious conclusions for the decision-making of human judges.

Christoph Engel is Director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn and a Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at ETH Zurich. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Osnabrück and a long‑standing member of the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Bonn. He is widely known for his contributions to experimental and empirical legal studies. His research spans behavioral law and economics, psychology, political science, and data science, with an increasing focus on the applications of large language models for legal research.

Alternatively, join online:

Microsoft Teams
Meeting ID: 364 364 015 758 92
Passcode: 5rS36QF2