Legal Theory

My work on modelling legal argument naturally has made me interested in philosophy of law and legal theory. I occasionally present my work before audiences from these fields.

One of my research interests in legal theory is rational legal proof.

• In 2007 I co-organised an IVR-07 Workshop on Reasoning about Legal Evidence with Floris Bex and Bart Verheij. This workshop led to an edited volume on Legal Evidence and Proof: Statistics, Stories, Logic, published in Ashgate's Applied legal Philosophy Series, January 2009.

• Also in 2007, I was the program chair of a Conference on Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings (conference brochure), organised by Peter Tillers at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York (USA). This event resulted in a special issue of Law, Probability and Risk, Vol. 7, Issue 1-4.

Between 2012 and 2018 I was a co-organiser of and lecturer in the annual Summer School on Law and Logic at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

• In 2015 Floris Bex, Anne Ruth Mackor and I co-organised a Zif Workshop on Models of Rational Proof in Criminal Law at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld (Germany). This eventually led to a special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science on Models of Rational Proof in Criminal Law, in 2020. In this special issue six groups of researchers apply their favourite reasoning method(s) to the case files of an actual murder case.

Associations, interest groups, resources ...

• VWR - Dutch Association for Philosophy of Law
• IVR - International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy
• The North Sea Group. A research community on legal evidence and proof.