Lectio Magistralis - Prof. Christoph Engel

 

There are more than 200 sovereign states. Many of them are federations. Therefore the number of legal orders is even larger. Seemingly comparative law is fertile soil for quantitative analysis. There are many good research questions: is some legal order more economically or socially beneficial than another? Is the solution that one legal order has found for a prevalent social problem better than another? Does the rationale behind one approach better resonate with the moral intuitions of the law’s subjects? Yet if one takes statistical tests seriously, comparative law is almost hopeless. I will argue that lab experiments are a viable solution, and will illustrate the general point with applications from our lab.

 

 

Born 1956. Dr.jur. 1988. Habilitation 1992. Dr. h.c. (Hebrew University) 2017. Director at the Bonn Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. Professor of Law at Bonn University and at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Main area: behavioral law and economics. Multiple publications in peer reviewed law journals (e.g. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Economics), economics journals (e.g. European Economic Review, Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization), and psychology journals (e.g. Perspectives on Psychological Science, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making).