Empirical legal research to test judicial decisions

In making legal judgements, Dutch courts regularly use so-called 'societal views'. For example, within criminal law 'socio-ethical acceptability' is used as a measure of whether sexual contact between minors is a crime or not. Within private law 'what is socially acceptable' is used as a criterion in tort law, and at the intersection of liability law and corporate law, societal views play a role in the question of whether a natural person's conduct can be imputed to the legal entity. However, although judges rely on views in society when making certain judgments, they rarely mention how or where they found those societal views, nor whether and how they investigated what exactly those societal views are. This raises the question of whether...

Empirical Legal Research: a state of knowledge across Europe International Conference at the University of Toulouse (9+10 June 2023)

Toulouse University will soon host a two day conference on empirical legal studies with a particular focus on environmental law. It will bring together scholars from across Europe, including ELS pioneers such as Arthur Dyevre and Mathias Siems. Of twenty speakers overall, two currently work in German academia: Moritz Reese (presenting on "Lessons learned from an implementation study about the water directive") and Konstantin Chatziathanasiou (presenting on "Empirical constitutional law scholarship across Europe"). Here's from the conference website: Empirical legal research is defined as the systematic collection and...