Dr Jake Slosser
About
Dr Jacob Livingston Slosser is a Carlsberg Postdoctoral Research Fellow at iCourts – The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen Law Faculty. His research focuses on the use of cognitive science to understand conceptual change and decision making in international law and the use of artificial intelligence in law. This focus is reflected in his published work and lectures on areas such as:
- the regulation of artificial intelligence in public administrative law
- experimental and empirical approaches to legal linguistics
- the force of precedent the European Court of Human Rights
- law and gender
- and feminist legal theory.
Dr Slosser completed his PhD at the Brussels School of International Studies (University of Kent) where he developed a proof of method for efficacy of analysing legal concepts through the use of cognitive linguistics.
PhD research project
Project title: On the Use of Cognitive Linguistics to Explore Legal Concepts: judicial interpretation of privacy law in Europe
Project description: The quest for how legal concepts generate and reproduce themselves and how those concepts are applied to specific cases is one of the most intractable and difficult to answer. This is even more true when old concepts are used to understand new realities. Traditional legal methods used to trace the power of precedent on courts still struggle to capture intricate, if not more subtle, conceptual change.
This thesis investigates the conceptual links throughout the precedent chain using the guiding hand of cognitive linguistics; namely, conceptual metaphor. Using computer-aided coding methodology to explore the use of metaphor to build conceptual structure concerning data control in EU/COE case law, this work analyses the recent ‘Safe Harbor’ case in the European Court of Justice and its chain of case citations to cases in ther European Court of Human Rights to provide a proof of method to show the viability of using cognitive linguistics to explain notions of coherence, interpretation, conceptual change, and the power of precedent.
The goal is to lead to a larger forecasting model of legal scholarship. It addresses the questions: as a case study, how can metaphor analysis help clarify the transfer and interpretation of legal concepts throughout a chain of precedent and understand the concepts through which data privacy via traditional privacy are built? The scaffolding on which the law’s abstract concepts are built is taken apart to reveal the underlying, non-abstract components of how ideas link together and affect conceptual transformation. This paper argues for a supplement to the traditional method of legal category building and holds out an extended arm from the world of cognitive linguists to the conceptual mores that is law.