Laws, the international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of legal systems, theory, and institutions, is accepting papers for their special issue: Models of Law and in Law: Uses, Opportunities, and Risks.
Deadline for manuscript submissions: March 15, 2023
This Special Issue will explore both the modeling of law—as a tool to understand, criticize, and improve legal practice—and modeling in law—as a way to understand the phenomenology of legal practice, its normativity, and the sources of legal disagreement. It will consider both current research and policy making associated with models and examine opportunities and risks associated with modeling. For example, where and how is modeling useful, helpful, and appropriate for research uses, for policy design, and for legal analysis? What are the implications of models’ limits?
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Models of law, legal systems, and legal decision making, examining legal practices and institutions from an external or outside perspective.
- Models of legal actors. How are human agents and collectives implicitly or explicitly modeled within various theoretical traditions? For example, the rational actor model at the heart of the law and economics movement may be the most well-known such model and has been the subject of intense criticism and of behaviorally based modification. What alternatives have been explored or should be explored?
- Models used by legal actors within legal practices and institutions. Relevant questions could examine the implications for law of model-based theories of human consciousness and could focus on how individuals and groups invoke and use models to decide legal questions.
Guest editors:
Michael J. Madison, Professor of Law and John E. Murray Faculty Scholar, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Christian Turner, Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law
For paper submission information, please visit the Special Issue Website.
