ACT & ACLE Seminar: Dr. Sebastian Benthall

"Agent-Based Modeling as a Legal Theory Tool"

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a versatile social scientific research tool that adapts insights from sociology and physics to study complex social systems. Currently, ABM is nearly absent from legal literature that evaluates and proposes laws and regulations to achieve various social goals. Rather, quantitative legal scholarship is currently most characterized by the Law and Economics (L&E) approach, which relies on a more limited modeling framework. The time is ripe for more use of ABM in this scholarship. Recent developments in legal theory have highlighted the complexity of society and law’s structural and systemic effects on it. ABM’s wide adoption as a method in the social sciences, including recently in economics, demonstrates its ability to address precisely these regulatory design issues.

Date: 8 November 2021
Time: 15:30 -17:00

Portrait of Sebastian Benthall — Professor Sebastian Benthall.

Paper

Seminar paper can be found here.

Practicalities

This will be an online event. You may register to attend by using the link below.

About the speaker

Sebastian Benthall is a (U.S.) National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and a Senior Research Fellow at the Information Law Institute and New York University School of Law. He is developing heterogeneous agent modeling techniques to study the relationship between the economy of personal data, the real economy, and the financial system. He is also interested in software accountability and internet governance.

About ACT

The Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law (ACT) is a leading international research centre on European private law. ACT offers high-quality contributions to research and education on the role of private law in constituting and changing societies. We understand private law in a broad sense, encompassing both traditional areas (including contract, tort, property, family, and company law) and relative newcomers in the field (such as consumer law, labour law, insolvency law and financial law). In our research and teaching we make use of a variety of methods in order to understand the various dimensions of private law.

About ACLE

The Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics (ACLE) is a joint initiative of the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality interdisciplinary research at the intersection between law and economics.