This paper really caught my eye--on its considerable merits and also because it represents a growing and important trend in interdisciplinary work at the intersection of law, psychology, and philosophy.
Paul H. Robinson and Robert Kurzban (University of Pennsylvania Law School and University of Pennsylvania - Department of Psychology) have posted Concordance & Conflict in Intuitions of Justice on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The common wisdom among criminal law theorists and policy makers is that the notion of desert is vague and the subject to wide disagreement. Yet the empirical evidence in available studies, including new studies reported here, paints a dramatically different picture. While moral philosophers may disagree on some aspects of moral blameworthiness, people's intuitions of justice are commonly specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself - physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions - people's shared intuitions cut across demographics and cultures. The findings raise interesting questions - such as, what could explain this striking result? - and hint at intriguing implications for criminal law and criminal justice policy.
This paper is part of a growing body of work, crossing the disciplines of law, psychology, and philosophy, that we might call it "experimental jurisprudence," borrowing the locution from the related discipline of "experimental philosophy." John Mikhail has done some very interesting work, see his Aspects of the Theory of Moral Cognition: Investigating Intuitive Knowledge of the Prohibition of Intentional Battery and the Principle of Double Effect. From a different angle, also see Robin Kar's The Deep Structure of Law and Morality.
