PROFESSOR DONELSON PUBLISHES PAPER IN THE JOURNAL COGNITIVE SCIENCE
June 2021 — Professor Raff Donelson’s recent paper “Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law” will be published in the journal Cognitive Science. Read a prepublication version of the paper here.
Professor Donelson and a team of co-authors explored a curious finding from some of Donelson’s earlier work, co-authored with Ivar Hannikainen. In a 2020 article, Donelson and Hannikainen surveyed Americans about their beliefs on legal systems and found that Americans are likely to report two apparently conflicting beliefs: (1) for something to be a law, it must conform to certain rule of law principles and (2) that actual laws fail to conform to those same rule of law principles. Donelson and Hannikainen wondered whether this curious finding was a peculiarity of American English speakers or something deeper. In the new study, to be published in Cognitive Science, Donelson, Hannikainen, and a team of collaborators from around the world found the same pattern in speakers of a variety of languages from a wide array of countries (e.g., Brazil, Cambodia, Poland). The robustness of the pattern suggests that there is something important to explain about the folk conception of law. This new article continues Professor Donelson’s work in experimental jurisprudence, the burgeoning field where researchers use the techniques of the social sciences to explore questions in general jurisprudence.
Professor Raff Donelson is an Associate Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law who earned his J.D. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. Professor Donelson’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, constitutional law, and criminal law. His more theoretical research interests include metaethics and general jurisprudence, while his doctrinal work focuses on constitutional protections for criminals and the accused. His scholarship includes contributions to books published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, as well as articles in U.S. and foreign law reviews and in philosophy journals such as Metaphilosophy. He has been an invited speaker at numerous legal and philosophy conferences and has addressed both U.S. and foreign academic audiences. His work is featured in Legal-Phi, which is an online venue that profiles the work of rising stars in the field of legal philosophy.