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.
