CALL FOR PAPERS: Journal for Digital Legal History, "Agent-Based Modelling in Law and Legal History" (DEADLINE: 30 September 2025)

 

2025 Call for Papers: Agent-Based Modelling in Law and Legal History

The Journal for Digital Legal History invites submissions for its 2025 issue on the (mis)use and potential of agent-based modelling (ABM) in legal history and legal studies. This issue will explore how computational simulations can serve as heuristic and hermeneutic tools, rather than replacements for “traditional” (however defined) legal research, to illuminate the dynamics of law as a complex system.

Submissions from all fields of law and legal history are welcome. This includes private, public, European, and international law, both contemporary and historical.

Background and Rationale

Agent-based modelling is now “a common and well-established tool in social sciences and certain of the humanities” (Klein, Marx, and Fischbach 2018). Agent-based models construct artificial societies of autonomous “agents” whose simple rules of interaction generate emergent macro-level patterns. Historians are increasingly open to simulation and have thought fairly extensively about the epistemology of ABM (Düring 2014; Gavin 2014).

ABM remains underutilized in law and legal history but offers unique strengths: It can make assumptions explicit, allow for counterfactual “what-if” experiments, and uncover the generative sufficiency of hypothesized mechanisms (Benthall and Strandburg 2021; Schwartz 2020). Legal historians could employ ABM to test theories by simulating alternative sets of legal “rules of the game” and observing the resulting outcomes.

We welcome diverse formats:

Research articles (up to 10000-15000 words) presenting ABM-driven projects.

Technical essays (2000–5000 words) with code snippets, notebooks, or visualizations.

Reflections: Shorter pieces (up to 2000 words) on methodological hurdles, interdisciplinary collaboration, or critiques of ABM.

Trial and error (up to 5000 words): pieces reflecting on failed attempts to implement ABM in a project or grant application, identifying the specific factors or obstacles that led to failure or success.

Deadline: 30 September 2025 (authors can request another timeline in consultation with the editorial board)

Bibliography

Benthall, Sebastian, and Katherine J. Strandburg. 2021. “Agent-Based Modeling as a Legal Theory Tool.” Frontiers in Physics 9. doi:10.3389/fphy.2021.666386.

Düring, Marten. 2014. “The Potential of Agent-Based Modelling for Historical Research.” In Complexity and the Human Experience: Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences, eds. Paul A. Youngman and Mirsad Hadzikadic. CRC Press, 121–37.

Gavin, Michael. 2014. “Agent-Based Modeling and Historical Simulation.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8(4). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/4/000195/000195.html (April 28, 2025).

Klein, Dominik, Johannes Marx, and Kai Fischbach. 2018. “Agent-Based Modeling in Social Science, History, and Philosophy. An Introduction.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 43(1 (163)): 7–27.

Schwartz, Alex. 2020. “Agent-Based Modeling for Legal Studies.” In Computational Legal Studies: The Promise and Challenge of Data-Driven Research, ed. Ryan Whalen. Edward Elgar, 312–27.

More info with the JDLH.

PRECONFERENCE WORKSHOP PROGRAM: ESIL IG History of International Law, "(De-/Re-)Constructions of International Law over Time and Space", 2025 ESIL Annual Conference (Freie Universität Berlin, 10 September 2025)

 

2025 ESIL Annual Conference Reconstructing International Law

Pre-Conference Workshop:

  (De-/re-)constructions of International Law over Time and Space

Wednesday 10th September 2025, 15:00 to 18:00, Berlin

There has been no agreed-upon definition as to when ‘international law’ exactly began, but it is generally agreed that (de-/re-)construction has been a common theme in the history of international law at various times. This workshop aims to better understand the theme of ‘reconstructing international law’ from a historical perspective: (1) What have been the causes and reasons for (re-)constructions of international law in its history? (2) How has international law fared after past major systemic crises? (3) What can we learn from institutional and normative projects of (re-)constructing ‘new’ international law in the past?

Programme

15:00 – 15:05	Introduction and words of welcome (Sze Hong Lam)
15:05 – 16:15	Panel 1: De-/reconstruction through historical archives
	Dr. Ralph Janik (Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna): Totalitarian International Law Now and Then: Lessons from the 1940s Dr. Alina Cherviatsova (Ghent University): The Unrecognized Republic: Ukraine's Struggle for Independence in the Shadow of the Versailles Treaty
	César Targowla (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University): Construction and Deconstruction of Sovereign Legitimacy During the French Revolution: The Emergence of a New Concept in International Law, the Government-in-Exile
	Moderator: Jaanika Erne (University of Tartu)
16:15-16:20	Break
16:20-17:10	Panel 2: De-/reconstruction of the history of colonialism and international law
	Professor. dr. Henri de Waele (Radboud University/ University of Antwerp): “Lie There, My Art.” The (Re)construction of International Law in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1919-1940
	Marcel Modest-Massner (University of Vienna): Rethinking the Colonial Imprint: A Dual Lens on the History of International Law
	Moderator: Anastasia Hammerschmied (University of Vienna)
17:10-18:00	Panel 3: The spatial de-/reconstruction of international law
	Dr. Milena Mottola (University of Padova): From roads to borders, and back again? International law’s (time)lines
	Miguel Rodríguez Vidosa (Tilburg University): The Place of Territory in Public International Law. An Intellectual History of Legal Space
	Moderator: Dr. Florenz Volkaert (Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve – Ghent University)
18:00:18:10	Final remarks (Sze Hong Lam)

Conveners

Anastasia Hammerschmied – Florenz Volkaert - Jaanika Erne – Sze Hong Lam