Linarelli on The Cognitive Science of Comparative Law: An Emerging Area of Study?

John Linarelli, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has published The Cognitive Science of Comparative Law: An Emerging Area of Study? as U. of Pittsburgh Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2025-31. Here is the abstract.

Comparative law is a heterodox field of legal study from the standpoint of method. It is a field because of what it does – “compare” - and not by how the comparing is done. It is open to any method advancing the aim of comparing law across national borders. Despite this methodological diversity, few published works have deployed the cognitive or behavioral sciences in comparative law. Insights from the cognitive sciences, including on the group aspects of human thought and action, on biases and heuristics, and on the evolution of culture, have the potential to offer in some instances significant advances in comparative law scholarship. Moreover, as comparativists we face the potential of interjecting our own biases into our work, or heuristics that work from our own jurisdictional perspective. A view from nowhere is impossible. Call this cognitive imperialism: the domination of a lawyer’s thinking about what is good and right about the law, based on what they sense or know about their own law. This article attempts a contribution to the methodological literature on comparative law by exploring how a new field of the study of comparative law using the cognitive sciences, might contribute to comparative law scholarship. Part I lays out the theoretical and methodological groundwork. It also explains that the cognitive science under investigation here is broader in scope than behavioral law and economics but certainly includes that approach. Parts II through IV explore several directions for this new field of study. Part II offers the case that the cognitive sciences offer tools to aid in understanding global law making, such as the work of UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT, and other intergovernmental organizations. Putting a group of lawyers from different jurisdictions in a deliberative process in an intergovernmental organization to produce a legal instrument that must be widely accepted across many jurisdictions could be understood as the setting for a natural experiment for comparativists. Part III explains that the cognitive sciences offer tools to evaluate legal transplants in a way that may help us to understand how they adapt to local conditions and on why some transplants are more successful than others. Part IV informs that the cognitive sciences may be able help us to get around the epistemological obstacles that “legal culture” has presented in comparative law. Part V deals with potential objections and limitations.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.