Complex Legal Constructivism: Law, Cognition and Complexity
Event date
16 June 2017
Event time
14:00
Oxford week
Venue
Seminar Room D (Law Faculty)
Speaker(s)
Dr Enrique Cáceres, National Autonomous University of Mexico
Abstract
A widely shared belief among jurists is that legal norms regulate social life and therefore, it is enough to legislate to be able to change it. But is that so? The purpose of this talk is to present some results in my attempt to answer the question: How does the law really work in the construction of social reality? To do so, I will present some advances in a theoretical approach that I call “Complex Legal Constructivism” (CLC) which can be defined as a theoretical and methodological framework consisting (mainly) of the integration of contemporary cognitive sciences and complex theory in order to understand the way in which positive law and legal theory influence the construction of social reality through agents and institutions.
For CLC 'social reality´ denotes the set of social (re)presentations resulting of cognitive processes that include beliefs, thoughts, feelings, attitudes and perceptions about what is considered to be the case in the world and determine our institutionalized and intersubjective controlled social interaction. Are examples of socially reality racism, democracy, courts, etc.