36.2040, Confs: Law's Many Users - Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions (Estonia)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2040. Wed Jul 02 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2040, Confs: Law's Many Users - Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions (Estonia)

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Date: 02-Jul-2025
From: Mark Fogel [mark.fogel at ut.ee]
Subject: Law's Many Users - Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions


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

Date: 12-Nov-2025 - 14-Nov-2025
Location: Tartu, Estonia
Contact: Mark Fogel
Contact Email: mark.fogel at ut.ee
Meeting URL: https://philevents.org/event/show/137409

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics

Submission Deadline: 23-Jul-2025

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.
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 laws.many.users at gmail.com.



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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2040
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