Plato’s Socratic dialogues depict Socrates as advocating for two conflicting requirements. Socrates sometimes says that a non-expert is required to retain autonomy and to think for herself. On other occasions he suggests that the non-expert is required to defer to the expert’s opinion. This paper offers a way to resolve the tension between these requirements. For Socrates, both intellectual requirements are dependent on the one’s intellectual aim. Socrates thinks that one is required to think independently if one’s aim is to acquire the expertise that the interlocutor professes to have. However, if one’s aim is simply to make a correct decision in a particular situation, one is required to defer to an expert opinion. If one’s epistemic aim determines which requirement one should comply with, then, for Socrates, what counts as a reason for belief is sometimes dependent on one’s (epistemic) aim.

How may experimental jurisprudence contribute to legal questions or advance legal scholarship? This chapter provides a preliminary perspective from German criminal law with a focus on the specific legal practice of doctrinal reasoning (Rechtsdogmatik). It has not been in the focus of experimental jurisprudence, which is understood broadly as empirical studies with laypersons and experts about various legal questions. It overlaps with the classic field of psychology and law, but it is primarily interested in addressing normative aspects. German law is one of the main civil law systems, with firm roots in Roman law. German criminal law has noticeable influence on numerous legal systems throughout the world, from South America to Japan. The following thus hopes to promote the dialogue between these systems and between them and the common law jurisdictions.

We review experimental research on judicial decision-making with a focus on methodological issues. First, we argue that only experiments with relatively high realism, in particular real judges as study subjects, plausibly generalize to judicial decision-making in the real world. Most experimental evidence shows lay subjects to behave very differently from expert judges in specifically legal tasks. Second, we argue that studying the effects of non-law is not a substitute for studying the effects of law since large unexplained residuals could be attributed to either. Direct experimental studies of the law effect are few and find it to be puzzlingly weak. Third, we review the substantive findings of experiments with judges, distinguishing between studies investigating legal and nonlegal factors and paying close attention to the nature of the experimental task.

Necessary tools for the success of the new participatory framework for democratic global governance will be expertise, rules and rule enforcement, and interaction among the new circles of participation across and up and down the different levels of governance. We must be able to discern when expert advice is needed and when to heed it to produce better results. We must also be able to tell what is expert advice and what is not. In the process of democratic decision-making in the new network of democratic global governance, there must be a balance between the combination of right representation and collective wisdom on the one hand and technical and other forms of expertise on the other; for such a balance will produce the best results. What is more, just as we need a different kind of democracy, so too do we need a different kind of rules. A reorienting of global rules away from the limitations of the Westphalian system and in a planetary direction is required for the new network of democratic global governance. There must also be continuous interaction among all the participating parts and all the different levels of the new framework of democratic global governance.

As part of the legal test for bias, the courts have created a fictional fair-minded observer (the FMO) to act as a conduit for reasonable public perception. A number of scholars have raised concerns that the FMO bears no resemblance to an average member of the public or reasonably reflects general public opinion. This chapter presents our original empirical pilot study on expert versus lay attitudes to judicial bias. The study compares responses of legal insiders (lawyers and judges) and nonlegal experts with a basic understanding of the law (law students) to leading cases on judicial recusal. We use vignettes based on real cases from England, Australia, and Canada that dealt with different claims of judicial bias (covering issues of race, prejudgment, and more). The study may allow us to draw conclusions about the similarities and differences between legal experts and laypeople in relation to the perception of judicial bias, and we suggest ways the full study can address methodological limitations in the pilot that would allow us to draw those conclusions with greater confidence.

If our aim is to pluralise the ‘subjects, methods, and aims’ of the academic study of international organisations, then one fairly obvious route to follow is that of historicisation. Historians of international organisations have elected a variety of avenues to relate the creation and the design of international institutions. Building on their work, this chapter offers another tool to the methodological palette the present volume offers; on the other hand and more specifically, I want to reflect on what international organisations are from the point of view of their making. To do so, I zoom in on one important moment in the history of modern international organisations: the 1865 international telegraph commission in Paris that convened to determine the scope and purpose of the first formal and permanent international organisation, the International Telegraph Union. I approach this case through the lens of micro-politics, combining biographical and sociological methods. Methodologically I study international organisations by means of biographical membership analysis; theoretically I argue that international organisations cannot be fully understood in separation from the situated political motives of their makers.

In the shifting context of global policy making, International Organisations (IOs) have become powerful sources of expert authority and central sites for the exercise of power in global governance. While we have a clear understanding of how IOs deploy expertise, there has been relatively little effort among legal scholarship and International Relations to critically examine the processes by which such institutions produce and validate knowledge claims about governance objects and, in doing so, authorise certain solutions as the only ‘viable’. This chapter examines the way in which the World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and UNICEF acted as central vehicles in defining the contours of ‘hidden hunger’ as a ‘matter of fact’ – or as a medicalised and economised object of governance. It shows how this problematisation largely validated the prioritisation of short-term responses and easily measurable programmes such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation in Global South countries. Rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic determinants of the problem, such responses acted as political analgesics providing temporarily relief. In highlighting how IOs’ ‘ways of seeing’ are connected to the practice of governing, the chapter sheds light on the everyday politics of rule-making.

This chapter proposes to study the making and stabilisation of expertise in global governance. While doing so, it questions mainstream approaches in international law and International Relations, which see international organisations’ reliance on expertise as a rationalisation of global politics. The approach taken here proposes, instead, to examine the political processes and decisions that participate in the production and assembling of ‘expertise’ in global governance. It proposes that the power–knowledge nexus in global fora can be explored by taking the following (complementary) entry points: focusing on sites and networks of knowledge production, studying infrastructures of knowledge production, or analysing relations between people and/or between people and the material.

This chapter takes the example of the International Criminal Court’s ‘Independent Expert Review’ (IER) of 2020 to reflect on the theory and practice of expert reform work. Taking actor-network theory’s prompt that systems – like international organisations – are neither static nor fixed, but ‘in a perpetual state of forming and reforming’, I read reform neither as rational science nor as a mere reproduction of hegemony, but as the expert reassembly of the ICC’s context, problems, resources, and priorities. In the IER example, the expert work of reform and reassembly effected nothing less than the recalibration of the relationship between the Court and its states parties. Through their work, experts knit together ideas of autonomy and accountability, their training, investigatory processes, documents, and resource and time constraints to centre the efficiency concerns of wealthy states parties in the judicial and prosecutorial function. In this way, expert reform work illustrates the power of expert articulation by putting abstract expectations, ideas, ‘realities’, constraints, and materials into organisational action in deeply distributive ways.

This chapter delves into the production of scientific knowledge and its practice within the expansive temporal and geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire. Organized chronologically into two main sections, the chapter portrays the foundational scientific institutions and conventions while also introducing the textual and material facets of scientific enterprises. Through this focused lens, the chapter traces the enduring and evolving elements of scientific pursuits and their sociopolitical implications from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

The artes, in the sense of systematic treatises on various disciplines of specialized knowledge, are not well understood today because they are usually studied in isolation from one another. This book argues that the artes of the early Roman Empire—the period of the greatest flourishing of this kind of literature—belong to a common intellectual culture and ought to be studied together. Their unity stems ultimately from a shared preoccupation with relating theory to practice vis-à-vis disciplinary expertise. Within the artes, the theory–practice problem stimulated the emergence of theories of knowledge and theories of nature embedding Roman specialized knowledge in a broader understanding of the world. Indeed, the artes crystallize a uniquely Roman scientific culture that has not been previously recognized as such. The aim of this book is to study this scientific culture.