This Article sheds new light on the long-running debate in EU legal studies about how intense the EU judicial review of complex and uncertain assessments requiring specialist knowledge could and should be. It argues that it is necessary to move beyond formulas and concepts hammered out in the judicial statements of reasons and consider how the institutional context affects legal epistemology. How likely is it that the judges form an independent opinion about the probative value of the presented evidence and the soundness of the administration’s specialist reasoning? How likely is it that their opinion is reliable? Answering these questions helps appraise the boundaries in which judicial review or proliferating administrative review by partly specialised boards of appeal foster the rule of law understood as the pursuit of non-arbitrariness. The Article examines recent case law of the EU Courts and the Board of Appeal of the European Chemical Agency concerning public health and environmental issues, in which complex and uncertain specialist assessments were prevalent. It contends that, due to institutional limitations of EU adjudicatory bodies, a further expansion of the rule of law in EU decision-making requiring specialist knowledge should be pursued through extra-judicial means fostering transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability.

This article argues that the New Private Law Theory (NPLT) recently proposed by Grundmann, Micklitz, and Renner is radically multi-pluralist, in that it combines pluralism along a multitude of dimensions with the absence of any organizing or constraining principle on the meta level. Consequently, the NPLT makes no epistemic commitments about private law truth or ontological commitments about private law reality. The article raises the question of whether a theory which makes no such commitments is a theory at all. Indeed, a site where quite divergent epistemic and ontological commitments are equally acceptable is not usually referred to as a theory but as a democracy. Therefore, the article discusses how NPLT could be turned into a democratic theory of private law. It concludes that to that end, NPLT’s selection of materials should be more diverse, in particular, less economically oriented, less Eurocentric, and more inclusive of various critical perspectives.

Philosophical debates over statistical evidence have long been framed and dominated by L. Jonathan Cohen's Paradox of the Gatecrasher and a related hypothetical example commonly called Prison Yard. These examples, however, raise an issue not discussed in the large and growing literature on statistical evidence – the question of what statistical evidence is supposed to be evidence of. In actual practice, the legal system does not start with a defendant and then attempt to determine if that defendant has committed some unspecified or under-specified act, as these examples appear to suppose. Rather, both criminal and civil litigation start with a sufficiently specified act and then attempt to determine if the defendant has committed it. And when we start with a more fully specified act, the statistics look very different, and these prominent examples no longer present the paradox they are claimed to support. Examining the issue of specification, however, does more than simply undercut the prominent examples in a long and extensive literature. The examination also raises normative issues challenging the legal system's traditional reluctance to base liability on the conjunction of probabilities.

The existence of experts raises a host of interesting questions in social, legal, and political epistemology. This article introduces and discusses interested experts – people who are experts on some topic, but who also have a distinct set of values and preferences regarding that topic, so that they are not well-described as “disinterested” parties. Interested experts raise several distinct problems in social, legal, and political epistemology. Some general questions arise: can we rationally or justifiably form beliefs relying on interested expert testimony? Do they constitute knowledge? Under what circumstances? This article focuses on a specific question in legal epistemology: should interested experts be allowed to serve on juries and, if so, should it be permissible for lawyers to strike them from the pool of potential jurors? My hope is that concentrating on this question will provide insight into the more general questions concerning the epistemology of testimony with respect to interested experts, while also providing concrete recommendations for jury reform to improve the epistemic performance of juries.

Big Data is now permeating environmental law and affecting its evolution. Data-driven innovation is highlighted as a means for major organizations to address social and global challenges. We present various contributions of Big Data technologies and show how they transform our knowledge and understanding of domains regulated by environmental law – environmental changes, socio-ecological systems, sustainable development issues – and of environmental law itself as a complex system. In particular, the mining of massive data sets makes it possible to undertake concrete actions dedicated to the elaboration, production, implementation, follow-up, and adaptation of the environmental targets defined at various levels of decision making (from the international to the subnational level).

This development calls into question the traditional approach to legal epistemology and ethics, as implementation and enforcement of rules take on new forms, such as regulation through smart environmental targets and securing legal compliance through the design of technological artefacts. The entry of Big Data therefore requires the development of a new and specific epistemology of environmental law.

This paper explores the relationship between style and epistemology as regards the discipline of law – especially in the Romanistic tradition – and, more specifically, its resistance to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on literary theory and discourse analysis literature, the first part of this paper examines the notion of ‘style’ in relation to academic disciplines. It argues that the variety of writing styles reflects the various epistemologies underlying the different disciplinary discourses and makes interdisciplinarity difficult to implement in general. The second part of this study borrows Roland Barthes's distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts in order to show that lawyers’ writing manners hinder the ability of law to connect with other disciplines. Against the background of the two sections, this contribution will finally include a discussion on what could be done to enhance law(yers)’s capability for interdisciplinary thinking, concluding that style might be not so insignificant a place to start with.

The objective of this paper is to present analytical and theoretical reflections on the interdisciplinary dialogue between law and sociology. The presentation of contradictions and shared interests between these two disciplines can contribute to interdisciplinary anthropology that focuses on the sometimes difficult “immigration” experienced by those who mobilize more than one academic field in their research. This paper is particularly addressed to those lawyers who start interdisciplinary dialogue within the discipline of sociology.

This paper argues that the concerns and methodology of the recently completed Report of the International Law Commission (ILC) over the fragmentation of international law presuppose a particular way of understanding legal language which tends to separate the understanding of rules from their factual adaptability to certain recurring social problems faced within specific institutional contexts. The paper argues that separating rules from their factual adaptability focuses the analysis on surface coherence – coherence at the level of abstract terms and phrases. It is the argument of this paper that this presupposition is not warranted, and that the understanding of rules cannot be thus separated. An alternative model of the understanding of legal language is developed on the basis of the work of Bernard Jackson and Geoffrey Samuel. This is further supplemented by the approach to the study of institutional contexts in the recent work of Robert Summers and John Bell. Together, these resources can lead to the analysis of the deep coherence of the international legal order, that being one that prioritizes not the unity of that order, but its responsiveness. The ideal of responsive law is elaborated upon by reference to the work of Philip Selznick and Philippe Nonet. Finally, a different agenda for the ILC is offered on the basis of the methodology of deep coherence. The upshot is that the paper calls for a reorientation of international legal theory, away from concerns about ‘the law itself’ and towards an engagement with the responsiveness of legal work performed in international legal institutions.