Doctrine as a Decision Aid: A Symposium at the Interface of Law, Research on Decision-making and Computer Science, Ercolano, Italy, 2025
Doctrine has been at the center of law and economics. In this tradition, doctrinal rules are interpreted as exercises of state authority that change the incentives for the law’s addressees. This symposium proposes a complementary perspective: It is interested in the effect of doctrine on those who have authority to apply the rules, i.e. on judges and administrators. Arguably, doctrine is effective since the typical legal case is only imperfectly defined. Decision makers have to find a way around legal indeterminacy und factual uncertainty. The symposium relies on psychology to reconstruct the mental process of human decision makers. And it explores the power of large language models to rigorously study the process. This is made possible by the architecture of LLMs. They are so successful precisely because they can handle imperfectly defined problems.