03.07.2025
international research
Further information
Mark Fogel
Member of the conference team
University of Tartu

Conference "Law's Many Users" explores how different professionals interpret legal norms

Office and a long hall with a doorway at the end
Author: Alex Davies

The international conference “Law’s Many Users” explores how professionals from different fields interpret legal norms within the constraints and opportunities of their respective organisations. The conference will take place on 12–14 November 2025 at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tartu, bringing together researchers and practitioners from philosophy, linguistics, law, and the social sciences.

“Law’s Many Users: Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions”
Philosophicum, Jakobi 2, rooms 336 and 114 in Tartu

HOW DOES LAW ACQUIRE MEANING — AND WHO SHAPES THAT MEANING IN EVERYDAY LIFE?

Law is interpreted and implemented by many hands. Some of them belong to judges, legislators, or lawyers — but many belong to nurses, teachers, municipal officials, or department heads: professionals who encounter law not in courtrooms or casebooks, but in institutional documents, contracts, checklists, and internal protocols. These actors do not interpret law as legal theorists or as abstract "laypeople," but as role-bound individuals embedded in specific organisational contexts. Their understanding of legal norms is shaped by institutional incentives, bureaucratic hierarchies, resource constraints, inherited routines, and pressures to defer to internal authorities. They are interpreters, but also implementers — conduits through which law acquires practical meaning.

While experimental jurisprudence has deepened our understanding of how legal concepts like causation, intention, or rights are grasped by legal experts and ordinary citizens, it has rarely focused on this middle terrain: how individuals interpret legal rules as part of their job, within the constraints and affordances of organisational life. The conference offers an opportunity to understand how abstract legal ideas connect with real-world reasoning and behaviour.

Thus, the programme combines theoretical reflection with experimental and case-based studies. Across three days of talks and discussions, participants will look at the many ways in which rules, meanings, and moral intuitions interact — from how children understand everyday rules, to how artificial intelligence systems and business professionals make sense of privacy law, to how judges interpret precedents and legislative texts.

WHAT ARE THE COVERED TOPICS?

  • how laws are interpreted, translated, and transformed across languages and legal systems;
  • how moral and social intuitions influence our judgments about right and wrong;
  • how technology and AI are reshaping the practice and understanding of law;
  • how children, citizens, and professionals make sense of rules in their daily lives;
  • and how interpretation connects the formal language of law with the lived experiences it governs.

WHO’S GOING TO BE THERE?

The talks are by diverse range of disciplines: cognitive science, economics, law, philosophy, and sociology as well as practicioners:

  • Alex Davies (Department of Philosophy, University of Tartu)
  • Emmi Kaaya (Department of Philosophy, University of Tartu)
  • Ivar R. Hannikainen (Department of Philosophy, University of Granada)
  • Mario Armando Sandoval Islas (Department of Law, University of Genoa)
  • Salima Issina-Shorman (Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University)
  • Krete Paal (GDPR Registry)
  • Katarina Kovacevic (Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University)
  • Jekaterina Nikitina (Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations, University of Milan)
  • Elena Pedroni (Faculté des Lettres, UFR de Philosophie Sorbonne, Sorbonne University)
  • Karolina Prochownik (Faculty of Law and Administration, Jagiellonian University)
  • Kati Rantala (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki)
  • Kevin Toh (Faculty of Laws, UCL / the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)
  • Johanna Vanto (Faculty of Law, University of Turku)
  • Michał Wieczorkowski (Faculty of Law and Administration, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
  • Alexander Wulf (Centre for Social Legal Studies, University of Oxford / SRH University of Applied Sciences Heidelberg, Campus Berlin)

SOUND INTERESTING? THEN COME AND JOIN US!

  • Participation is free, but we kindly ask you to REGISTER to make sure there’s enough coffee and snacks for our discussions to flow.
  • You can register for the whole conference or for individual days.
  • Registration deadline: 7 November 2025

  • If you're not in the area, but you'd like to join us remotely, then could you let us know HERE?

GETTING TO TARTU FROM OUTSIDE OF ESTONIA

If you’re coming to Tartu from outside of Estonia, you can get to Tartu in the following ways:

  • Fly to Tallinn, and take the bus or train down to Tartu.

  • Fly to Riga, and take the bus or train up to Tartu.

  • Fly to Helsinki and then take a flight in a small plane down to Tartu airport (or take a ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn and then a bus/train to Tartu).

Bus information (for travel between Tallinn and Tartu, and between Riga and Tartu)

For information about travelling by train between Riga and Tartu.

HOTELS

The conference is going to take place in the town centre at Jakobi 2 (see Google Map). There are hotels right next to us. And a bit further down the road closer to the bus station and the river.

Visit us virtually before you arrive: Virtual tour of the University of Tartu.

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Conference organisation is led by Alex Davies, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Language.

The organisation of the conference is funded by the Estonian Research Council grant PRG2151 "The Role of Metacontexts in Stabilizing Text Content: a case study of Estonia’s Road Conditions Requirements Ordinance".

Until 14 Nov

Conference "Law's Many Users: Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions"

Tartu, Jakobi 2, room 336 (on 12 Nov), room 114 (on 13–14 Nov), Estonia
12 Nov 2025 09:30 –
14 Nov 2025 16:00
Organisers:
Press contact
Margot Must
MA (European Studies)
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics
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