Special Issue of LAWS entitled: "Models of Law and in Law: Uses, Opportunities, and Risks"
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. Relevant questions could account for actors, institutions, rules, and decisions, among other things, and might include the point or purpose of models, the kinds of questions that models might answer, and relationships between models and legal theory.
- 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.
Please see a PDF version of the full description of the issue's scope (plus submission and other logistics info) here.
Submissions are welcome from all fields and all researchers. Papers are due on March 15, 2023.
Submissions will be selected after review by the Guest Editors and a peer review process conducted by MDPI, the publisher of LAWS.