Ivar Hannikainen, Kevin Tobia, Guilherme Almeida, Raff Donelson, Filius Dranseika, Markus Kneer, Strohmeier Niek, Piotr Bystranowski, Kristina Dolinina, Bartosz Janik, Sophie Keo, Egle Lauraityte, Alice Liefgreen, Maciej Próchnicki, Alejandro Rosas Martinez, and Noel Struchiner have published Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have often argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we contribute cross-cultural data to this debate: Are there cross-cultural principles of law? Participants in eleven different countries (N = 3054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws—in a between-subjects design. Confirming our pre-registered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the nature of law which defy people’s conception of how legal systems function in practice.
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