GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA

GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA

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Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law
(2021) Tobia, Kevin P.; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Donelson, Raff; Dranseika, Vilius; Kneer, Markus; Strohmaier, Niek; Bystranowski, Piotr; Dolinina, Kristina; Janik, Bartosz; Keo, Sothie; Lauraityt, Egle; Liefgreen, Alice; Próchnicki, Maciej; Rosas, Alejandro; Hannikainen, Ivar R.
Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have arguedthat laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. Inthe present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different coun-tries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054)were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Conﬁrming our pre-registered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there aresuch laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the conceptof law which defy people’s grasp of how legal systems function in practice.
A dual character theory of law
(2024) GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA
One persistent question in jurisprudence relates to the role of morality in the concept of law. For instance, consider the question of whether unjust statutes are laws. Legal positivists say that they’re laws in every relevant sense, while natural lawyers say that they’re not. This article considers a different answer inspired by recent findings in experimental philosophy: there is one relevant sense in which unjust statutes are laws, but also a different relevant sense in which they aren’t. After considering the ways in which this alternative differs from some of the mainstream theories in general jurisprudence, the article argues that it provides more elegant solutions to two problems that have puzzled legal philosophers in the past: the paradox of customary international law and the shifts in legal discourse over history.
Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication
(2021) Bystranowski, Piotr; Janik, Bartosz; Próchnicki, Maciej; Hannikainen, Ivar Rodriguez; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Struchiner, Noel
Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the abstract/concrete paradox (ACP): the tendency to activate inconsistent intuitions (and generate inconsistent judgment) depending on whether a problem to be analyzed is framed in abstract terms or is described as a concrete case. One recent study supports the thesis that this effect influences judicial decision-making, including decision-making by professional judges, in areas such as interpretation of constitutional principles and application of clear-cut rules. Here, following the existing literature in legal theory, we argue that the susceptibility to such an effect might depend on whether decision-makers operate in a legal system characterized by the formalist or particularist approach to legal interpretation, with formalist systems being less susceptible to the effect. To test this hypothesis, we compare the results of experimental studies on ACP run on samples from two countries differing in legal culture: Poland and Brazil. The lack of significant differences between those results (also for professional legal decision-makers) suggests that ACP is a robust effect in the legal context.
Extracting value from Brazilian Court decisions
(2022) Fernandes, William Paulo Ducca; Frajhof, Isabella Zalcberg; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Rodrigues, Ariane Moraes Bueno; Barbosa, Simone Diniz Junqueira; Konder, Carlos Nelson; Nasser, Rafael Barbosa; Carvalho, Gustavo Robichez de; Lopes, Hélio Côrtes Vieira
We propose a methodology to extract value from Brazilian Court decisions to support judges and lawyers in their decision-making. We instantiate our methodology in one information system we have developed. Such system (i) extracts plaintiff’s legal claims and each specific provision on legal opinions enacted by lower and Appellate Courts, and (ii) connects each legal claim with the corresponding judicial provision. The information system presents the results through visualizations. Information Extraction for legal texts has been previously approached in the literature for different languages, using different methods. Our proposal is different from previous work, since our corpora comprise Brazilian lower and Appellate Court decisions, in which we look for a set of plaintiff’s legal claims and judicial provisions commonly judged by the Court. We use the following methods to tackle the information extraction tasks: Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network; Conditional Random Fields; and a combination of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network and Conditional Random Fields. In addition to the well-known distributed representation of words in word embeddings, we use character-level representation of words in character embeddings. We have built three corpora – Kauane Insurance Report, Kauane Insurance Lower, and Kauane Insurance Upper – to train and evaluate the system, using public data from the State Court of Rio de Janeiro. Our methods achieved good quality for Kauane Insurance Lower and Kauane Insurance Upper, and promising results for Kauane Insurance Report.
Lawful, but not Really: The Dual Character of the Concept of Law
(2024) Flanagan, Brian; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA
Disagreement on law’s relationship to morality has long been driven by disagreement about our ordinary concept. Until recently, however, there had been no systematic investigation of lay intuitions. In this paper, we advance this nascent effort. Across two studies (N = 697), our findings reveal that most people consider law to be more than a matter of political circumstance alone. Contrary to the expectations of most contemporary philosophers, morality (both substantive and procedural) emerges as a key influence on judgments of legal validity: many people say that conduct prohibited by immoral statutes is not truly illegal, and that immoral conduct which was never explicitly prohibited is truly illegal. This suggests that people often treat law as a dual character concept that, like the concepts of scientist or of artist, features autonomous concrete and abstract dimensions.
Epistemology Goes AI: A Study of GPT-3?s Capacity to Generate Consistent and Coherent Ordered Sets of Propositions on a Single-Input-Multiple-Outputs Basis
(2024) Araújo, Marcelo de; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Nunes, José Luiz
The more we rely on digital assistants, online search engines, and AI systems to revise our system of beliefs and increase our body of knowledge, the less we are able to resort to some independent criterion, unrelated to further digital tools, in order to asses the epistemic reliability of the outputs delivered by them. This raises some important questions to epistemology in general and pressing questions to applied to epistemology in particular. In this paper, we propose an experimental method for the assessment of GPT-3’s capacity to generate consistent and coherent sets of outputs. When several outputs to one and the same input are very repetitive they tend to be consistent with each other, that is they do not contradict each other. But consistency does not make the set of outputs as a whole more informative than the outputs considered individually. We argue that the less informative a set of outputs is, the less coherent it is. We establish a conceptual distinction between consistency and coherence in the light of what some epistemologists refer to as a coherence theories of truth and justification. While much attention has been given to GPT-3’s capacity to produce internally coherent individual outputs, we argue, instead, that more attention should be given to its capacity to produce consistent and coherent outputs generated on a single-input-multiple-outputs basis.
Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning
(2024) GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Nunes, José Luiz; Engelmann, Neele; Wiegmann, Alex; Araújo, Marcelo de
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit expert-level performance in tasks across a wide range of different domains. Ethical issues raised by LLMs and the need to align future versions makes it important to know how state of the art models reason about moral and legal issues. In this paper, we employ the methods of experimental psychology to probe into this question. We replicate eight studies from the experimental literature with instances of Google's Gemini Pro, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, OpenAI's GPT-4, and Meta's Llama 2 Chat 70b. We find that alignment with human responses shifts from one experiment to another, and that models differ amongst themselves as to their overall alignment, with GPT-4 taking a clear lead over all other models we tested. Nonetheless, even when LLM-generated responses are highly correlated to human responses, there are still systematic differences, with a tendency for models to exaggerate effects that are present among humans, in part by reducing variance. This recommends caution with regards to proposals of replacing human participants with current state-of-the-art LLMs in psychological research and highlights the need for further research about the distinctive aspects of machine psychology