Law's Many Users: Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions

Law is interpreted and implemented by many hands. Some of them belong to judges, legislators, or lawyers—but many belong to nurses, teachers, municipal officials, or department heads: professionals who encounter law not in courtrooms or casebooks, but in institutional documents, contracts, checklists, and internal protocols. These actors do not interpret law as legal theorists or as abstract "laypeople," but as role-bound individuals embedded in specific organizational contexts. Their understanding of legal norms is shaped by institutional incentives, bureaucratic hierarchies, resource constraints, inherited routines, and pressures to defer to internal authorities. They are interpreters, but also implementers—conduits through which law acquires practical meaning. 

While experimental jurisprudence has deepened our understanding of how legal concepts like causation, intention, or rights are grasped by legal experts and ordinary citizens, it has rarely focused on this middle terrain: how individuals interpret legal rules as part of their job, within the constraints and affordances of organizational life. 

This conference is an occasion for exploring that terrain. 

Call for Abstracts (submission deadline: July 23, 2025)

We invite submissions from scholars across disciplines interested in how laws and regulations are interpreted, implemented, and transformed in real-world institutional settings. 

Legal meaning is shaped not only in courts or legislatures, but in offices, classrooms, clinics, and council chambers—by actors whose interpretations are framed by professional roles, organizational logics, and institutional incentives. This conference invites reflection on the interpretive practices that emerge in such contexts, and how these practices affect what law becomes in use. 

We welcome work from experimental jurisprudence, philosophy of language, linguistics, law & economics, public administration, and related fields. Contributions may be theoretical, empirical, or methodological. 

Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 

• Studies of how non-lawyers interpret and apply legal or regulatory texts 

• Experimental investigations of interpretation in institutional settings 

• Pragmatic and semantic analysis of policy and legal communication 

• Incentive structures and role-based reasoning in interpretation 

• Legal meaning as mediated through contracts, guidelines, or protocols 

• Interpretive drift and discretion in organizational environments 

• Extensions or critiques of experimental jurisprudence beyond traditional contexts 

• Interdisciplinary methods for studying law “in the wild” 

Abstracts are applications for 1-hour slots (30-40 minute talk + 30-20 minute Q&A). Abstracts (max. 600 words -- excluding a list of references) should: (a) make clear the line of argument for the conclusion defended; (b) make clear the relevance of the envisioned talk to the conference theme; and (c) be prepared for anonymous review. 

Submitting Abstracts: Abstracts should be submitted with a separate coversheet (author, email, institution) to [email protected].