Brian Flanagan

I just posted a new pre-print where I argue that dual character concepts are something new and interesting in legal philosophy and beyond and that they can't be reduced to ambiguity, prototypes, or metalinguistic negotiations. Comments are very welcome! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Strikingly, we found no legitimacy penalty for AI assistance. Hypotheticals featuring courts guided by computer-generated legal research were viewed as just as legitimate as those relying on human staff. @almeida2808.bsky.social, Daniel Chen, Angela Gitahi.

The rule of law or the rule of robots? Nationally representative survey evidence from Kenya With AI now passing the bar, and with increasing court caseloads worldwide hampering access to justice, there are calls for judges to make use of chatbots to help expedite their work. Such calls po...

Evidence of Public Acceptance of AI Law Clerks: We investigated how Kenyans evaluate the legitimacy of court decisions when judges rely on AI-generated legal research—versus that of human law clerks. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/

Deserting as resistance: the Easter Rising’s impact on the Western Front - Village Magazine British military justice backfired in the case of Irish ‘Tommies’ By Brian Flanagan School history teaches that World War I’s causes were complex: Nationalism, Militarism, Imperial ambition and declin...

There was a time when the death penalty actually made people more likely to offend—at least if they were Irish; h/t Daniel Chen. See my piece in Village:
villagemagazine.ie/deserting-as...

‘We can’t have a room of robots’: senior judges reveal thoughts on AI Academics propose randomised controlled trial to measure effectiveness of technology.

A piece in @lawsocietygazette.bsky.social
discusses a report co-authored by Dr Brian Flanagan on the sitting judiciary's attitudes to the technology.

Our research points toward a legal future where AI complements rather than replaces human judgment,' Dr Brian Flanagan

Check out the first qualitative study of judges’ views on AI in law: users.wpi.edu/~esolovey/pa... Our focus groups featured a cross-section of 12 UK judges, including 5 members of the UK Supreme Court. Co-authored with Erin Solovey and Daniel Chen.

Experimental Jurisprudence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Experimental jurisprudence (or “X-Jur”) addresses questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those methods…

Experimental Jurisprudence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) plato.stanford.edu/entries/expe...

Fresh fuel poured on debate over Wikipedia influence on judgments Researchers who set the cat among the pigeons when they claimed to have evidence that Wikipedia was influencing judicial decision-making in Ireland have said they stand by their findings.

Researchers who set the cat among the pigeons when they claimed to have evidence that Wikipedia was influencing judicial decision-making in Ireland have said they stand by their findings.

As reported in the Irish Times this morning, our response to judicial critics of our Wikipedia research: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The more empathetic you are, the more you’ll prioritise a rule’s spirit over its letter.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

Legislative Intent and the Hard Problem of Content - Law and Philosophy The general aim of this paper is to investigate how philosophical problems with the notion of mental content affect the debate about legislative intent. Specifically, the aim is to define and criticiz...

New off the press, will be of particular interest to @philosophy-law.bsky.social, @lawstuff.bsky.social, @anuragdeb.bsky.social and many others

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Thanks Paolo! Yeah, skeptical accounts strike me as superficial because they seem to bottom out in an appeal to a brute fact that legislatures will have such-and-such properties or that all legislators will be individually incentivised to converge on some voting rule or other. 🙂

Thanks for the 'highly recommended' Larry!

Evidence of conceptual mastery in the application of rules by Large Language Models In this paper we leverage psychological methods to investigate LLMs' conceptual mastery in applying rules. We introduce a novel procedure to match the diversity of thought generated by LLMs to that ob...

Short thread on the latest paper led by @joseluiz.bsky.social w/ @lawstuff.bsky.social: arxiv.org/abs/2503.00992

The paper addresses two issues w/ previous machine psychology papers (including our own): 1) are LLMs mastering concepts, or are they memorizing the data? 1/14

Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes Abstract. How exactly do we know that a text is a law? This paper argues that purely legalistic explanations are inadequate because they do not explain why

Want to know why legislating is like forgiving? And why policy preferences are of secondary importance? Check out my new paper in the American Journal of Jurisprudence - Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes (open access)
academic.oup.com/ajj/advance-...

New paper with @joseluiz.bsky.social and @almeida2808.bsky.social showing that AI possesses the concept of rule. We find that generative AI emulates how humans apply rules to novel situations in which a rule's letter and spirit conflict. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I feel like Lon Fuller would be conflicted...

Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning Large language models (LLMs) exhibit expert-level performance in tasks across a wide range of different domains. Ethical issues raised by LLMs and the…

Nope! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In an ideal world, we would protect young people from accessing dangerous or harmful material, but increasingly, that isn't possible.

That's why in our Advanced Issues in Legal Philosophy class, @lawstuff.bsky.social and I let students encounter legal positivism in a controlled, safe environment.

And only the softer kind..

To be fair if a court said this it would be equally bonkers.

Empathy reveals the law’s spirit.

Ryanair seeks €15k in damages from disruptive passenger Ryanair has said a civil action filed against a passenger is part of a zero-tolerance policy on unruly behaviour on its aircraft and it warned it will not be the last time it sues somebody for causing...

Disruptive passengers beware my legal analysis: www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish.

Wait, neither Hercules nor the snail darter existed? www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/s...

Seeing ppl talk abt the “Feb submission cycle” for law reviews, so just want to point out that no other academic field forces ppl to finish their papers in sync w graduation calendars, bc no other field delegates assessing publishability to students w 2 yrs of (often inapplicable) study.

That’s halfling talk..

The accompanying paper by Samuel Burry suggests that Hart may have felt that his argument had been superseded by Dworkin's new formulation of his theory from the mid-eighties.

'Looking at foreign law for support is like looking out over a crowd and picking out your friends.' Europe feels the US Supreme Court love again.

A Dilemma for Proceduralist Theories of Democracy: Elected Delegates or Elected Monarchs? Abstract. Emphasizing the intrinsic value of formal political equality, a prominent strand of democratic theory—proceduralism—sharply disassociates democra

‘A Dilemma for Proceduralist Theories of Democracy’ published open access in the American Journal of Jurisprudence today! I argue (prove) that thin accounts of democracy either exclude familiar strands of representative democracy or admit elective autocracies. doi.org/10.1093/ajj/...