DiSCourse Seminar with Anna Wallerman Ghavanini
18 February 2022, 12:00 (CET), online
Big Blue Button
DiSCourse* - The Digital Science Seminar Series on
Understanding Law through Empirical Methods and Digital Tools
This presentation will discuss how empirical perspectives and digital research tools and methods have changed legal research, and what impact they are likely to have in the future. Law has traditionally been understood as a purely normative science. Legal scholars engage in interpretation of authoritative texts, seeking to establish the content of the law as a set of imperatives. The law’s consequences have been treated as predictions or hypotheticals, if discussed at all. However, the meaning of law is not only – perhaps not even mainly – decided in the high offices occupied by law-makers and supreme court justices and through the landmark decisions identified as statutes and precedents.
Law is also what occurs every day in tax offices, magistrate’s courts, prosecutors’ chambers, in decisions made by street-level bureaucrats often vested with significant amounts of discretionary power. Understanding the law as a practice provides us with a fuller picture of what the law is and how it functions in society. However, unlocking this practice requires legal scholars to adapt to new research methods. In particular, it requires a shift from theoretical to empirical enquiries and from individual sources to largescale datasets.
*featuring a distinguished guest: Anna Wallerman Ghavanini, University of Gothenburg
Anna Wallerman Ghavanini is an associate professor of EU Law at the University of Gothenburg. Among other things, she specializes in legal empirical studies. Currently she is completing a twomonth research visit at the University of Innsbruck as part of the LFUI Guest Professorship which is supported by the Circle of Supporters (Förderkreis 1669) and International Services.