Mission

The Center for Law and Behavior (C-LAB) produces and disseminates empirical knowledge about law and behavior. It aims to be the premier institute for academic and practical questions about the functioning of law and legal institutions, and the way that people respond to the law.

Scope

On the one hand, C-LAB seeks to understand behavior within the legal system and the way that legal processes operate. To this end, we study the functioning of legal processes including legal decision making, advocacy by lawyers, law enforcement operations, dispute resolution, behavior of legal professionals and rights invocation by rights holders. Moreover, we seek to understand what impact law has on individual and organizational behavior, why people obey or break legal rules, and what interventions can best enhance compliance. 

Theoretical aims and theoretical background

C-LAB draws on, and contributes to empirical insights and theories from across the social and behavioral sciences, including sociology, psychology, criminology, behavioral economics, behavioral ethics, anthropology, management science and public administration. C-LAB also seeks to develop a behavioral jurisprudence that corrects flawed assumptions and biases in legal theory and practice about the way people behave within the legal system and in response to the law.

Societal relevance

In order for law to protect rights, reduce harmful and risky behavior, and provide fair dispute resolution, it must somehow come to transform its paper rules into actual practices. C-LAB offers state-of-the-art knowledge about how this transformation takes place. C-LAB studies which barriers may obstruct successful rights invocation, law enforcement and dispute processing. The centre puts this knowledge into practice by partnering with practitioners who seek to overcome behavioral challenges in the legal system, or aim to improve behavioral responses to the law. In this role, C-LAB will also function as a field laboratory, conducting randomized trials to evaluate which intervention can best improve behavior within, or in response to the legal system.

Approach

C-LAB works in a multi-disciplinary, mixed methods, empirical, and collaborative manner. C-LAB projects feature scholars from multiple disciplines, and often from multiple institutions from across the globe. C-LAB has three core types of projects: 

1. Integrative projects. Here, C-LAB scholars work together to develop state of the art insights on law and behavior issues from existing empirical studies. 
2. Explorative projects. Here, C-LAB develops new concepts, empirical explorations, and interventions that aim to advance current perspectives on law and behavior in academia and practice to new directions. 
3. Implementation projects. Here, C-LAB upscales new insights into full-fledged interventions in practice, and evaluates their effectiveness by means of empirical research.