Research

Ecological and technological developments – such as climate change and artificial intelligence – are challenging classical legal concepts and doctrines that lawyers and legal scholars have long considered a settled part of their conceptual apparatus. Beyond individual concepts and doctrines, such developments are also challenging the ontological and epistemological foundations of core legal concepts. Debates surrounding ‘rights of nature’, for example, have highlighted the need to adjust our legal vocabularies to a multitude of new entities that cannot be identified with human individuals or collectives. Emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence, meanwhile, cannot neatly be categorized along the person/property or agent/object divide.

Such developments highlight an underlying problem with Western legal conceptual vocabularies and ontologies: they strongly rely on anthropocentric prerequisites, such as conceptions of autonomy, intentionality, self-determination, interests or dignity, focusing on human individuals and collectives, but are as such not capable to encompass agents beyond the human, whether in natural or artificial form.

The difficulties of adapting our legal conceptual apparatus and ontology to the challenges posed by more than human agency highlight the need to carefully and critically re-examine and reconfigure the anthropomorphic presuppositions underlying Western legal ontology. By employing philosophical reflection and insights from adjacent disciplines and approaches, this research stream seeks to rethink some of the crucial ontological presuppositions related to core legal concepts such as personhood, agency, responsibility, rights, or duties.

This research stream touches upon foundational aspects of law, such as legal reasoning, legal interpretation, conceptual analysis of law, as well as the study of the underlying values of legal systems and the place of law in society. As such, its aim is to explore issues of legitimacy, constitutionalism and democracy, rule of law, justice through a variety of methodological angles, including law and society and analytical legal philosophy. 

Providing a comprehensive  and interdisciplinary view of law’s normative power and normativity, in general, requires us to delve into the study of Authority combining legal, political and moral philosophy and public law theory. 

As a result, the  research stream welcomes scholars from various philosophical traditions to engage in philosophical research on normativity and authority and their relation to law. Engaging involves participating in workshops, reading groups, and other research-related activities. .

Legal discourse is based on deeply held beliefs and presuppositions about how the mind works. But many of these beliefs and presuppositions have turned out to be either false or hotly disputed by science. In any modern democracy, people "freely and deliberately" elect their representatives. Parliament translates the "will" of the people into law. All laws are published so that everyone "knows" what they require. Judges "make decisions based on the law", thus implementing the will of the people in individual cases. Punishment is meted out only to criminals who have "willingly" broken the law, “knowing” in advance the legal consequences of their criminal actions.

All of these are key ideas in contemporary legal systems, and all of them are deeply intertwined with (potentially problematic) folk-psychological assumptions about the workings of the minds of various actors within the legal system. An important task for legal theory in the 21st century is to discuss and critique these assumptions, combining analytical approaches to the philosophy of law with empirical approaches. This shift in the study of law correlates, on the one hand, with the naturalisation project initiated by Quine and his critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction in the field of epistemology, which continues today in relation to all areas of the social sciences, and, on the other hand, with the emergence of so-called experimental philosophy.

This research stream investigates shifts, links and relationships between global markets, nature and the common good with a strong interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on insights from, among other sciences, law, history, economics, moral theory and natural sciences. It investigates how we can better understand the switch from public normativity to private normativity, often hidden in the changing form of contracts, global value chains, legislation or financial assets, and the role of companies in shaping a global legal order. Further, it examines whether and how governments and private actors deal with moral, social or planetary boundaries to economic activities. This then leads to more philosophical questions: Should governments shape global markets? Why do we use the notion of ‘Nature’ for moral, legal and economic purposes? To what extent are our conceptions of justice suitable to meet the challenges of human welfare, inequality and the nature crisis? And what does this have to do with the common good? To what extent is it even desirable for normative orders to aim at the common good, and can we give a satisfactory account of what comprises the common good from a global perspective? Can there be, for instance, a post-colonial common good, or a global common good? Some members of this stream also critically analyse notions of the public good and the common good arising from shared ideas between political liberalism, political economy and natural sciences, and investigate how these findings could contribute to a better governance of the global economy, the new geoeconomic orders and the protection of nature, including human nature.