Law
How can law research help to solve the world’s most pressing problems?
How can law research help to solve the world’s most pressing problems?
At its heart, legal research starts by looking at laws. They can be old laws, current laws, or laws that don’t exist yet. They can be your country’s laws, other countries’ laws, laws of countries that don’t exist anymore or laws of countries that don’t exist yet. Sometimes, researchers look at laws’ contexts too. After comparing these laws and their contexts, authors draw conclusions on how the law is, how it was, how it evolved, or how it should be.
Looking at laws is important because laws dictate when and how a state, and its citizens, may use violence; successful analyses reveal ways of recognizing, preventing, and interrupting extreme state-imposed violence. For example, Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ in 1944 when working as an international criminal law professor by analyzing patterns of state persecution. Coining this term has allowed intergovernmental agencies to prohibit these patterns of violence, researchers to study its causes, advocates to rally around it, and innovators to build off it. The same innovative legal framing can contribute to reducing current suffering (e.g. by coining that suffering), managing and responding to global power conflicts (e.g. prohibiting those practices), and prevent mass-suffering (e.g. sanctioning states when they show red flags).
Conversely, legal research is vital because laws dictate peoples’ day-to-day conditions and expectations; these successful analyses reveal ways of promoting the kinds of societies we want to live in. For example, Derrick Bell, the first Black tenured law professor at Harvard University, was an intellectual forefather of critical race theory (CRT). This theory is a major framework being taught in law schools across North America that tracks the efficacy of interventions meant to correct for institutional racism. It also and provides the methodological underpinnings for interventions like affirmative action or hate speech reduction. Similarly, legal research can reduce discrimination against non-humans, improve institutional decision-making, or promote prosocial behaviors by informing what we look when trying to do the most good.
Whether it’s preventing a catastrophe or promoting a utopia, legal research can pinpoint where society goes wrong, what needs fixing, and how laws or understanding laws can fix them. In this way, legal research can contribute to some of the world’s most pressing problems on both practical and theoretical levels. As such, legal theses can be highly effective at doing good.
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Gaps in international governance of dual-use research of concern examines how governments could better protect against the inherent risk of studying pathogens more seriously.
A Theory of Legal Personhood examines who or what can be a legal person.
The Windfall Clause proposes a novel legal regime that would protect against a market takeover by a company that makes incredible profits from its novel AI.
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Jeffray Behr’s Career Guide to End Factory Farming
See this overview of how research into policy and regulation can contribute to alternative proteins being adopted.
Knowledge Gaps: Animal-Focused Research Ideas For Grad Students
AI Governance Agenda by Allan Dafoe
Contributors: With thanks to Julian Guidote for creating this introduction.
