Website of the European Journal of Legal Studies
Latest issue: 2011, 4, Issue 2 (Symposium on Citizenship and Migration)
ISSN 1973-2937
An Open Access Initiative by EUI Legal Researchers
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In a context of global legal pluralism, the application of the law can be analysed at several levels, namely national, international and regional. At each level, legal systems are organized around different normative hierarchies. This raises questions regarding the articulation of these constructions in a multilevel perspective of legal application that is both practical and theoretical. To answer these questions, two approaches are imaginable: a first that studies the application of normative hierarchies, level by level and, beyond that, legal system by legal system; a second that aims to make explicit the interactions that can result from the coexistence of different normative levels. This study favours the second approach while attempting to appreciate the material and formal utility of normative hierarchies each time a jurist questions the application of the law at different levels. Two conclusions can be drawn from this study: there is a plurality of normative hierarchies in a context of global legal pluralism; in a process of multilevel legal application, normative hierarchy coexists with other methods of reasoning.
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Over a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes invited scholars to look at law through the lens of probability theory: ‘The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law’. But Holmes himself, and few others, have taken up this intriguing invitation. As such, in place of previous approaches to the study of law, this paper presents a non-normative, mathematical approach to law and the legal process. Specifically, we present a formal Bayesian model of civil and criminal litigation, or what we refer to as the ‘litigation game’; that is, instead of focusing on the rules of civil or criminal procedure or substantive legal doctrine, we ask and attempt to answer a mathematical question: what is the posterior probability that a defendant in a civil or criminal trial will be found liable, given that the defendant has, in fact, committed a wrongful act?
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