Are There Legal Universals? Plumbing Legal History for a Common Core
Location:
Moot Court Room
Old College
Date/time
Fri 14 November 2025
13:00-14:00
This event is hosted by Edinburgh Centre for Legal History.
A growing body of research is demonstrating that human intuitions often align with the various statutes, codes, and judicial decisions that constitute law. Additional lines of research have demonstrated universal, or near-universal, aspects of human moral cognition, including things like the condemnation of killing and assault, a proportional sense of punishment, and a duty to respect prior ownership. Drawing on these two lines of research, it follows that if people share certain moral intuitions across cultures and over time, and if laws appear to often derive from moral intuitions, then laws across cultures and over time should reflect these common moral intuitions. This research aims to test that hypothesis by surveying a comprehensive list of legal codes and other legal corpora across history to look for the presence, or lack thereof, of a recurrent set of laws that reflect our shared moral core.
About the speaker
Carlton Patrick is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Central Florida. He studies the psychology of legal decision making, often from an evolutionary perspective. He is the coauthor of Objection: Disgust, Morality, and the Law (OUP).
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