It's poetry in motion

Marco Almada

Marco Almada

— 6 min read
It's poetry in motion
Photo by Adrien Converse / Unsplash

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! This should be the first 'proper' issue now at the newsletter's new home, now that I'm back from a much-needed staycation. In today's issues I'll think aloud about the relationship between law and science, a hobby horse of mine. After that, you'll see the usual: a few recommendations, some opportunities, and adorable otters to wrap up the deal.

All my tubes and wires and careful notes

When I first decided to attend law school, I was primarily interested in philosophical questions about the law.[1] To further ground my development in this field and broaden my horizons, I decided to take some courses at the philosophy department. Two of those ended up being in Philosophy of Science, both taught by Valter Alnis Bezerra[2]: in one of them, we spent the semester on a close reading of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the other was dedicated to making sense of the concept of models in philosophy. Those courses have been eye-opening, and I keep referring to their conceptual toolkit in some of my work, even though I ultimately decided to focus on technology law and regulation.

Before making that decision, however, I had entertained the idea of pursuing a PhD that would approach legal scholarship as a knowledge-producing practice. That research emerged, in part, from how annoyed I am at how Civil Law try to revive the label of legal science from time to time. I am not quite sure that what we mean by 'science' in Portuguese or English is actually a good description of what legal scholars do or should do.[3] If that holds, trying to adopt a definition of science that encompasses both the work of jurists and that of natural and social scientists would lead to standards that are inadequate to either or both sides of the divide.

But what annoyed me the most is that defenders of the idea of a legal science would rarely bother to engage with scientists or philosophers of science. At best, they would regurgitate some half-remembered Popper[4] or Kuhn[5] to defend the honour of legal scholarship without engaging with the implications of their frameworks. So, younger Marco ended up with a half-baked idea that we might use some recent works in philosophy of science to try and map what distinguishes what we do in legal scholarship from scientific practices. Alas, no doctoral programme was interested in that,[6] and it turns out I am better suited to shallower forms of research.

This is not to say that law has nothing to do with scientific research. I am pretty comfortable with the idea that legal research generates knowledge, which can be useful for practice but is ultimately different from what practitioners would do with much less tight time constraints than they face in practice. Moreover, as the project I mentioned above suggests, I believe some of the tools and questions raised by philosophy of science might be useful for understanding the knowledge-generating aspect of legal scholarship. By looking at the law from those perspective, and triangulating them with other forms of reflection about the law, we might understand better how legal scholarship is similar to scientific research---and when those similarities break down.

Fortunately, discussions about law and science can also take forms that are more interesting than the simple question of 'is there a science of law?'[7] A recent trend in legal scholarship has paid more attention to what one could term the conditions of knowledge about the law. For example, Martijn Hesselink has written on how understandings of EU law are shaped by the researchers's epistemological and ontological commitments.[8] There is also considerable attention to the handling of scientific knowledge within the courts, for example in this insightful article by Marta Morvillo and Maria Weimer. But I, for one, would like to see more work on the social epistemology of legal scholarship, that is, to how the production of knowledge about the law is shaped by the dynamics within communities of legal scholars.

My original plan for this issue, in fact, was to share a few thoughts about research agendas in the law and how we determine whether a research agenda has failed. The paragraphs above were meant as a prologue, but they quickly got out of control, so I'll stop for now and come back to the topic in the future. In the meantime, please let me know if you are familiar with recent production on the social epistemology of legal scholarship!

  1. In Brazil, as one would expect from a Civil Law jurisdiction, this means quite a bit of Kelsen and the Hart-Dworkin debate at the undergraduate level (and in my case, some Habermas from his later period as a minor Rawlsian). The graduate offerings were fortunately much more diverse. ↩︎

  2. Thanks, Valter! ↩︎

  3. This, of course, hinges a lot on the valence acquired by science in each language. Rechtswissenschaft is way more acceptable than ciência jurídica. ↩︎

  4. Especially if they are into some quantitative stuff. ↩︎

  5. Which is, like, my third or fourth least favourite thing about Boaventura de Sousa Santos. ↩︎

  6. At the same time, however, I was looking for a PhD outside Brazil, and ended up pitching this proposal to some Anglo departments, where, of course, the idea of thinking of law as a science is rightfully laughed out of the room. ↩︎

  7. Personally, I think 'law as engineering' offers a better model than 'law as science', but that is a discussion for another moment. ↩︎

  8. Acknowledging this value-ladenness of legal knowledge is not, in itself, an argument against the idea that law might be a science somehow. See, e.g., how philosophers of science discuss the impact of values in science and whether a value-free science is desirable or even possible. ↩︎

Things you might want to read

For those of you who are into Warhammer 40,000, make sure to check out Liam Kofi Bright's Sherden Pact! This page collects lots of material that Liam and other authors have thought about Liam's Khornite army. Basically, think about what kind of society a bunch of Utilitarians would build around the idea of maximizing blood for the Blood God and skulls for the Skull Throne. Hijinks ensue.

Opportunities

We are still in a slow period in the Northern Hemisphere, so I don't have that many opportunities to share.

The call for papers on (De)regulation: an interdisciplinary look at changes in EU government has been extended. Send your abstract by 1 September!

For scholars based in Brazil, CNPq has released a call to select up to 20 Brazilian PhDs to do research stays with principal investigators from ERC projects.

Erasmus University Rotterdam offers a fully-funded PhD position in AI, Law and Public Power, to be supervised by Pim Jansen and Sascha van Schendel. Applications are due by 3 September.

Lund University is looking for two PhD students in law with a specialisation in total defence, preparedness and resilience. Applications are due by 22 September.

Finally, if you are an EU national, make sure to contact your government regarding the Danish presidency of the Council's latest attempt to push a flawed proposal that will lead to massive scanning of online communications while failing to effectively protect children from the harms of the online environment. Voting is currently expected to take place around 14 October, so, if you have a voice on this, use it!

And now, the otters!

Sea otters holding hands

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