Experimental jurisprudence

Experimental jurisprudence (X-Jur) is an emerging field of legal scholarship that explores the nature of legal phenomena through psychological investigations of legal concepts. The field departs from traditional analytic legal philosophy in its ambition to elucidate common intuitions in a systematic fashion employing the methods of social science. Equally, unlike research in legal psychology, X-Jur emphasises the philosophical implications of its findings, notably, for questions about whether, how, and in what respects, the law's content is a matter of moral perspective. Whereas some legal theorists have welcomed X-Jur's emergence, others have expressed reservations about the contributions it seeks to make. Experimental jurisprudence (X-Jur) is an outgrowth of the broader experimental philosophy (X-Phi) movement. Emerging in the early 2000s, and focusing initially on the folk concepts of semantic reference, knowledge, and intentional action, X-Phi represented a rejection of analytic philosophy's traditional 'armchair' speculation about common conceptual intuitions. As a similarly empirical approach to the analysis of folk legal concepts developed in the 2010s, the prospect of a novel method of legal theory, 'experimental jurisprudence', was recognised. X-Jur shares analytic philosophy's interest in a range of questions, including the longstanding issue of whether the existence and content of the law is a matter of social fact alone. But X-Jur scholarship has argued that philosophers' appeals to the content of folk legal concepts ought to be tested empirically so that, the ‘big [philosophical] cost of rely[ing]... on... a concept that is distinct from that used by folk’, may be allocated correctly. X-Jur exhibits two basic lines of inquiry into, respectively, the folk concepts associated with features of particular laws or legal methods that are common among modern legal systems, and the general folk concepts of law and of rule application or legal interpretation. One broad X-Jur research agenda concerns topics in ‘special’ jurisprudence.