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Brian Flanagan

@lawstuff.bsky.social

670 followers 880 following 34 posts

School of Law, Maynooth University. Philosophy, law-and-courts. "Pesky academic" The Guardian; "Plainly wrong" High Court of Ireland.

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · May 12

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

Trial by Internet: A Response to Judicial Critics

In July 2022, we released a preprint of Chapter 38 of The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. In the months that followe

papers.ssrn.com

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Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · Aug 24

Perhaps the real ‘two tier justice’ is that the foot soldiers who do the racist tweets get jail time, whilst the lieutenants in journalism who write the racist articles and the colonels as editors who spew out the incendiary headlines, and generals who own the papers, just get lots of money.

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Guilherme Almeida @almeida2808.bsky.social · Jul 16

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....

A defense of dual character concepts in legal philosophy and beyond

Recent work in jurisprudence claimed that central legal concepts, such as that of LEGAL VALIDITY and of a legal RULE have a dual character structure. Moreover,

papers.ssrn.com

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jul 16

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.

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jul 16

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/

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...

www.tandfonline.com

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jun 30

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...

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...

villagemagazine.ie

Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology @maynoothlaw.bsky.social · Jun 18

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

‘We can’t have a room of robots’: senior judges reveal thoughts on AI

Academics propose randomised controlled trial to measure effectiveness of technology.

eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jun 18

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.

users.wpi.edu

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Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Lawrence Solum @lsolum.bsky.social · Jun 11

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

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…

plato.stanford.edu

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Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Irish Legal News @irishlegal.com · May 13

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.

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.

www.irishlegal.com

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · May 12

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

Trial by Internet: A Response to Judicial Critics

In July 2022, we released a preprint of Chapter 38 of The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. In the months that followe

papers.ssrn.com

1 4

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Apr 25

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

Guilherme Almeida @almeida2808.bsky.social · Apr 25

Now out @ Journal of Research in Personality (free until June): authors.elsevier.com/a/1k%7EqWL4L...

We found evidence that trait empathy correlates with purposivism in rule violation judgments. Also: most people share a single concept that seems to have a dual character structure.

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Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · Apr 15

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.

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Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Paolo Sandro @paolosandro.bsky.social · Apr 7

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...

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...

link.springer.com

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Mar 22

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. 🙂

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Mar 18

Thanks for the 'highly recommended' Larry!

Lawrence Solum @lsolum.bsky.social · Mar 18

Flanagan on Collective Mental Action and Statutes, buff.ly/6VFlRzQ - Brian Flanagan has posted Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes on the American Journal of Jurisprudence website.

buff.ly

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Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Guilherme Almeida @almeida2808.bsky.social · Mar 11

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

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...

arxiv.org

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Mar 6

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-...

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

academic.oup.com

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Mar 3

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....

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

papers.ssrn.com

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Feb 18

I feel like Lon Fuller would be conflicted...

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Feb 18

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

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…

www.sciencedirect.com

Reposted by Brian Flanagan

Conor Crummey @conorcrummey.bsky.social · Feb 13

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.

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Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Feb 13

And only the softer kind..

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jan 17

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

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jan 10

Empathy reveals the law’s spirit.

Nick Byrd, Ph.D. @byrdnick.com · Jan 10

Now the #ExperimentalPhilosophy Society session!

@almeida2808.bsky.social presented #xJur data with @lawstuff.bsky.social and Ivar Hannikainen: "Trait #Empathy Predicts Purposivist Rule Application"

Results in image #altText

#openAccess preprint: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

#xPhi #law #textualism

Two samples of participants (N≅500) who responded to 20 to 40 cases indicated that most people had both textualist and purposivist intuitions (about rules or "laws" like "no shooting animals" and "no smartphones in the classroom").

More data indicating that empathy correlated positively with purposive interpretations and negatively with textualist interpretations.

Other individual difference constructs that predicted variance in how people apply rules: action aversion, outcome aversion, control aversion, and some Big 5 personality constructs.

Implications
• People seem to share a single concept of rule that has a dual character in nature. This goes against contemporary worries in jurisprudence that propose purely interpersonal explanations of disagreement in legal interpretation. It also bolds well with recent accounts of philosophical problems, specially Knobe's (forthcoming)
• Obama appears to have been right: individual differences in the
"breadth of one's empathy" do indeed matter in the application of rules, but much less than whether the rule's text was violated.

Brian Flanagan @lawstuff.bsky.social · Jan 9

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

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...