This chapter focuses on why researchers and teachers who are involved in technology-enhanced language learning and teaching might find theoretical approaches useful and provides an overview of more established as well as emergent theories. In order to identify the more recent approaches used to conceptualize CALL today studies are reviewed from leading CALL journals. Key theories and approaches identified from studies were socioculturalism, mediated learning theory, activity theory, social presence, social justice education, maker culture, design thinking, rewilding, social semiotics/multimodality, multimodal interaction analysis, multiliteracies, geosemiotics, gesture studies, dual-coding theory, second language acquisition, dynamic systems theory, translanguaging, connectivism, willingness to communicate, self-determination, sports psychology, and identity and investment. The chapter demonstrates the increasing influence of concepts, theories, and methodologies that originate from other disciplines, resulting in “transdisciplinarity.” Many of the theories deployed highlight the transformative nature of language learning and teaching via an increasingly diverse range of tools and contexts, offering considerable scope for further methodological and pedagogical innovation.

This chapter introduces and explores the impact of context on technology in second language teaching and learning and the emerging theories that are shaping its future. The focus of research in this field has shifted toward blended and distance learning, flipped classrooms, and the use of mobile devices in low-tech environments. Teaching languages through games, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and virtual reality are also becoming popular. Social interaction, collaborative learning, learner motivation, and training are key factors in successful CALL implementation. Digital media are also being used to promote interculturality and develop literacies for teaching. Teacher resistance can be overcome through online communities for professional development. Task-based language teaching can improve the four language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The chapter concludes by outlining how technology can provide opportunities for language learning that can be tailored to individual needs and preferences.

Blended, or hybrid, approaches to language learning continue to gain prominence. Resonant with established definitions of CALL, such approaches seek to promote ecological perspectives and embrace the ubiquity of technology. Questions of effectiveness and the justification of resources may result in a greater need for argument-based evaluation. Future research in blended language learning must take into account concepts inherent in multimodality, social semiotics, and computer mediated communication. Rather than revisit blended learning, however, porosity of environments may forge new metaphors of understanding and research.

Learning takes place in social interaction. In social interaction, participants co-adapt to reach a commonn goal. Adaptive instruction describes a pedagogic paradigm, in which both learners and the learning technology co-adapt. This chapter provides an overview of the research on and the development of adaptive instruction in CALL.

Owners generally get to decide what happens to their property, and this is reflected in legal discussions of property rights and in how children and adults view ownership. Owners’ control over property fits with the idea that ownership serves to reduce conflicts over resources. This chapter first briefly reviews experimental research that fits with this side of ownership. However, the chapter then reviews ways that ownership can take control away from owners. One line of research work shows that children and adults think that nonowners are sometimes allowed to access and even modify property without the owner’s permission. A second line of research shows that whereas people normally have some choice in acquiring ownership or giving it up, people sometimes are viewed as acquiring and retaining ownership even when they do not want to.

Gender stereotyping has captured public attention, from the courtroom to the everyday workplace – but the term encompasses a variety of beliefs, motivations, and contexts. This chapter first discusses prominent theories of gender stereotyping that have been primarily used in employment discrimination contexts (e.g., social role theory, the stereotype content model). I then identify how adjudicators across a variety of legal contexts (e.g., judges, juries, employers, social services officers) behave in a stereotyped fashion, according to those theories. An understanding of where stereotyping occurs across underexplored contexts is ultimately valuable for our understanding of how and where researchers might intervene in disparities research.

Given how common portrayals of vigilantism are in history books, literature, cinema, television, and the popular press, it is surprising how little we know about the public’s attitudes and beliefs about the phenomena. While there is a fair amount of research by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists on various forms of vigilantism, only a limited number of psychological studies have explored people’s moral judgments about vigilantism in a controlled and systematic way. Our goal was to build upon the work that has been done by probing people’s moral, legal, and political judgments about what we call “retributive vigilantism” – that is, vigilante acts that are intended to give the deserved suffering to those who have harmed other people.

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression “reasonable” mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that “reasonable” is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term – at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. “careful,” “ordinary,” “prudent,” etc.), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term “reasonable” and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the courtroom.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made health law and disability law prominent in every area of life. Health law and disability law were therefore upgraded to the status of popular law school classes as well as to more mainstream legal scholars’ research agendas. Experimental jurisprudence scholarship has also gained momentum in recent years. Yet while the use of experiments to study policy and legal issues related to health and disability is off to a promising start, the potential of this approach remains far from being realized. In this essay, I will first show how the use of experiments has helped revisit core concepts in the fields of health law and disability law. I then review three strands of work that emerged in the existing literature on “experimental health and disability law”: the study of framing – the language of public health messaging; measuring perceived deservingness of government benefits; and testing efficacy of physicians’ conflict of interest disclosures. I conclude by pointing to new directions scholars should explore in future work.

The last several years have featured the development of legal longtermism – the set of theories associated with the view that law should be concerned with ensuring the long-term future goes well. Although recent literature has shown that the principles underlying legal longtermism are widely endorsed across the Anglosphere, it remains an open question whether these principles are endorsed across cultures. Here we surveyed laypeople (n=2,938) from ten countries – Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom and United States – regarding law’s role in protecting future generations. We find participants in our sample widely endorse (a) increasing legal protection for future humans beyond current levels; (b) extending personhood and standing to some subset of humans living in the near and far future; and (c) prioritizing the interests of future people over those of present people in some national and international lawmaking scenarios. Taken together, these results suggest the notion of granting rights and legal protection to future generations is endorsed cross-culturally, carrying wide-ranging implications for legal theory, doctrine, and policy.

Recent empirical work demonstrates that some instances of material deception are perceived by ordinary people as consent-defeating, whereas other instances are not. One hypothesized account of these divergent lay intuitions draws on the notion of “essence”: Roughly speaking, lies that pertain to the “core” or “nature” of a consented-to act are perceived as precluding consent, whereas lies that pertain to features that are “nonessential” or “collateral” to the act are perceived as compatible with consent. To assess this hypothesized account, an independent measure of “essence” – one that does not rely with problematic circularity on notions of consent – is needed. This chapter draws on an emerging cognitive science literature that deploys linguistic probes to investigate how people intuitively represent human action. Here, we will consider two such probes, the “by” test and the “basically doing” test, and observe that whereas the former predicts judgments of consent, the latter does not.

Should judges and other legal decision-makers follow the literal meaning of applicable legal rules even if there are compelling reasons to do otherwise? The question of the primacy of plain meaning in legal interpretation is one of the oldest and most persistent problems in the philosophy of law. In this chapter, we argue that new arguments are available in this debate, emerging from recent developments in experimental jurisprudence. We posit that legal interpretation is, to some extent, an exercise in coordination: Judges seek to interpret rules in a way that would match interpretations of their peers, of other legal officials, and of society at large. In such a strategic context, the plain meaning of law often constitutes a focal point around which different legal actors can coordinate – allowing them to promote the uniformity and predictability of law and, ultimately, to sustain the rule of law.

Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017) reported that legal experts’ intentionality ascriptions are susceptible to the “severity effect” (i.e., influenced by differently harmful side effects), which violates the outcome-independent legal concept of intentionality prevalent in many criminal law systems. This challenges the “legal expertise defense” (= legal experts are more competent users of legal concepts and their legal judgments are more reliable than those of laypeople). Prochownik, Krebs, Wiegmann, and Horvath (2020) hypothesized that the “severity effect” might be due to confounding features of the previously used vignettes (i.e., the somewhat bad cases not being perceived as harmful by legal experts). They created new stimuli with clear cases of harm that differed in the degree of harm across two conditions, and they did not observe any “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople. Yet, the difference in harm ratings across conditions was not very large. The current study addresses this limitation: Even after increasing the difference in the perceived degree of harm, we still do not observe the “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople.

Legal research is a repeat offender – in the best sense of the term – when it comes to making use of empirical and experimental methods borrowed from other disciplines. We anticipate that the field’s response to developments in eye-tracking research will be no different. Our aim is to aid legal researchers in the uptake of eye-tracking as a method to address questions related to cognitive processes involved in matters of law abidance, legal intervention, and the generation of new legal rules. We discuss methodological challenges of empirically studying thinking and reasoning as the mechanisms underlying behavior and introduce eye-tracking as our method of choice for obtaining high-resolution traces of visual attention. We delineate advantages and challenges of this methodological approach, and outline which concepts legal researchers can hope to measure with a toy example. We conclude by outlining some of the various research avenues in legal research for which we predict a benefit from adopting eye-tracking to their methodological toolbox.

In the common law tradition, legal decisions are supposed to be grounded in both statute and precedent, with legal training guiding practitioners on the most important and relevant touchstones. But actors in the legal system are also human, with the failings and foibles seen throughout society. This may lead them to take methodological shortcuts, even to relying on unknown internet users for determinations of a legal source’s relevance. In this chapter, we investigate the influence on legal judgments of a pervasive, but unauthoritative source of legal knowledge: Wikipedia. Using the first randomized field experiment ever undertaken in this area – the gold standard for identifying causal effects – we show that Wikipedia shapes judicial behavior. Wikipedia articles on decided cases, written by law students, guide both the decisions that judges cite as precedents and the textual content of their written opinions. Collectively, our study provides clear empirical evidence of a new form of influence on judges’ application of the law – easily accessible, user-generated online content.

This chapter offers a critique of experimental jurisprudence. While experimental jurisprudence can make an important contribution to legal knowledge and legal theory, theorists and practitioners of experimental jurisprudence should also be aware of its limitations. Experimental jurisprudence cannot, by itself, resolve legal theoretical debates. It is just one limited tool, with an important but partial role to play in the collective project of understanding and evaluating law and legal rules, institutions, and practices. This chapter offers a summary survey of some of the limitations of experimental jurisprudence in special and general jurisprudence. It also argues that, if we want to fully understand law and legal concepts, practices, and institutions, experimental jurisprudence needs to be supplemented with other perspectives – such as those provided by anthropology, qualitative research, and the humanities. These perspectives can capture precisely what experimental jurisprudence must necessarily ignore: that law is a complex institutionalized social and cultural practice constituted by the thought and talk of legal experts.