Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Abstract

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.