PROJECT DETAILS: OPUS 25 no. 2023/49/B/HS5/00753 by National Science Center, Poland; funding 999 999 PLN for years 2024-2028.
NCN official webpage: https://projekty.ncn.gov.pl/?projekt_id=590350
TEAM:
PI: Prof. ADAM DYRDA
Main Co-Investigators: dr MICHAŁ ARASZKIEWICZ, dr BARTOSZ BISKUP
PhD-Candidate/Investigator: Mr BARTŁOMIEJ BRZOZOWSKI
Other Investigators: Prof. TOMASZ GIZBERT-STUDNICKI, dr WOJCIECH GRABOŃ, Mr TOMASZ MACHALSKI, Mr KRZYSZTOF SZULIŃSKI, Mr MACIEJ PRÓCHNICKI, Ms KATARZYNA BOREK
PRPJECT DESCRIPTION:
This project investigates the philosophical and metaphilosophical foundations of legal interpretation through a comparative analysis of continental and common law theories, supplemented by empirical research on the beliefs and intuitions of legal professionals and laypeople. Its central hypothesis is that differences in the often tacit assumptions underlying interpretive theories have significant consequences for legal reasoning and practice. By reconstructing these assumptions, the project seeks to distinguish substantive disagreements from merely verbal disputes, assess the internal coherence of competing accounts, and establish a framework for their comparison across legal cultures.
The research integrates three complementary strands. First, it develops a metaphilosophical taxonomy of interpretive theories by examining their conceptions of philosophical inquiry, methods, and practical aims. The taxonomy addresses distinctions concerning ontology, epistemology, semantics, and value judgments, including realism and anti-realism, semantic internalism and externalism, and descriptive and normative theorizing. Second, it applies this framework to selected Polish, other continental, and common law theories, identifying their philosophical commitments, relationships to general theories of law, and theoretical and practical points of convergence and divergence. Particular attention is paid to the justification of linguistic, systematic, and purposive interpretive rules, the resolution of conflicts between them, and the interplay between semantic considerations and political morality. The comparative analysis also examines whether interpretive theories can claim cross-cultural applicability and whether the selective use of different theories can preserve philosophical integrity.
Third, surveys and experimental vignette studies test how the reconstructed assumptions relate to actual beliefs about law and interpretation. Comparisons between laypeople and legal professionals, and between continental and common law jurisdictions, examine the stability of relevant intuitions and their susceptibility to contextual and cognitive influences. The methodological approach combines literature analysis, conceptual clarification, charitable reconstruction, and comparative inquiry with empirical testing. Rather than treating prevailing intuitions as automatically authoritative, the project investigates their robustness and their relationship to theoretical commitments. Its expected contribution is a philosophically grounded framework for evaluating interpretive theories, clarifying the limits of their universality, and identifying the institutional consequences of their adoption. In doing so, it aims to strengthen critical self-understanding within jurisprudence and support more reflective and coherent legal interpretation.
Polish description (NCN page): https://projekty.ncn.gov.pl/opisy/590350-pl.pdf
BIOS OF TEAM MEMBERS:
Adam Dyrda, PhD habil. in law and PhD in philosophy, is a legal philosopher working primarily in analytic philosophy of law, pragmatism, social ontology, and the ethics of belief. He is a professor at the Department of Legal Theory at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has led several research projects, such as A Novel critique of American legal realism, Ethics of institutional beliefs, Metaphilosophy of legal interpretation, and Critical approach to the concept of marriage: the anti-essentialist perspective. Adam Dyrda is the author of three monographs and numerous articles on analytic legal theory and philosophical jurisprudence. He was also the editor of Metaphilosophy of Law (with T. Gizbert-Studnicki and P. Banaś, Hart 2016) and Research Handbook on Legal Evolution (with W. Załuski and S. Bourgeois-Gironde; Edward Elgar 2024) and Ethics of Institutional Beliefs: From Theoretical to Empirical (with B. Biskup, C. Wang and M. Juzaszek, Edward Elgar 2025). He is the head of Jagiellonian Centre for Law, Language and Philosophy.
Full CV: https://jagiellonian.academia.edu/AdamDyrda/CurriculumVitae
[TEAM…]
MAIN PUBLICATIONS:
ARASZKIEWICZ, M. (2024) Case Frames and Case-Based Arguments [in:] Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2024: The Thirty-seventh Annual Conference, Amsterdam, 2-13, https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA241229
ARASZKIEWICZ, M. (2025), Precedent as Interpretive Resource: A Case Frame Analysis of Statutory Reasoning [in:] Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2025: The thirty-eighth
Annual Conference, Amsterdam, 2-13, https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA251572
ARASZKIEWICZ, M & T. VAN ENGERS, A. WYNER, T. ŻUREK, Tipping the Scales: Balancing Principles [in:] Juliano Maranhao (ed.), ICAIL '25: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, New York, 258-267, https://doi.org/10.1145/3769126.3769208
DYRDA, A. & M. DUBOWSKA, „Państwo i Prawo” 5/2026 (y. 81); pp. 3-24; ISSN: 0031-0980; with M. Dubowska; Open PDF: https://assets.contenthub.wolterskluwer.com/api/public/content/M-Dubowska-A-Dyrda-Metafory-prawnicze-Owena-Barfielda?v=79fc8d99
DYRDA, A. & M. DUBOWSKA, Poetyczna dykcja i prawnicza fikcja [Critically translation of O. Barfield’s Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction (1948)], „Państwo i Prawo” 5/2026 (y. 81): pp. 100-125; ISSN: 0031-0980 ; with. M. Dubowska; Open PDF: https://assets.contenthub.wolterskluwer.com/api/public/content/O-Barfield-Poetycka-dykcja-a-prawnicza-fikcja?v=54162ca1
DYRDA, A. & M. DUBOWSKA, Czy można bronić dogmat(yk)ów? (Odpowiedź na polemikę W. Zontka), „Ruch Prawniczy, Socjologiczny i Ekonomiczny” 88(1), pp. 311–318. https://doi.org/10.14746/rpeis.2026.88.1.17
MACHALSKI, T., Dekonstrukcja jako strategia meta-interpretacji prawniczej - „Krytyka Prawa” (2026, tom 18, nr 2) DOI:10.7206/kp.2080-1084.861 ; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/410740489_Dekonstrukcja_jako_strategia_meta-interpretacji_prawniczej
SZULIŃSKI, K. Przestępstwo zgwałcenia po nowelizacji – nowe brzmienie, stare problemy, Archiwum Filozofii Prawa i Filozofii Społecznej, wydanie nr 3 (48) wrzesień 2026, s. 127-142
DOI: 10.36280/AFPiFS.2026.3.127 , https://archiwum.ivr.org.pl/afpifs-preannouncement-pdf/8377/przestepstwo-zgwalcenia-po-nowelizacji-vor.pdf
DYRDA, A. & T. GIZBERT-STUDNICKI, American Textualism in Legal Interpretation Through European Eyes [in:] International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication: From Text to Semiotics (ed. A. Wagner) – Section 4: Legal Interpretation and Meaning: Navigating Complexity in Legal Texts (eds. D. Canale, M. Novak, G. Tuzet), Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87993-7_93-1; p. 1-19 [living reference work entry]
Research Project sponsored by Research University – Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University – by Future Law Lab.
Team: Prof. Adam DYRDA (PI), dr Bartosz Biskup (co-investigator).
Project description: What makes something a contract, a marriage or a legal person? Do the creators of legal institutions have privileged knowledge of their nature, or does their meaning depend on how society understands and uses them? CALAEA explores these questions at the intersection of legal philosophy, epistemology and social ontology — the study of institutions and other products of social life. The project focuses on legal artifacts: products of human activity, such as legal institutions and legal texts. It asks what we can learn about them through conceptual analysis. Does analysing concepts merely clarify our beliefs about law, or can it also reveal the actual properties of legal institutions? Central to this inquiry is the question of epistemic access: who can accurately identify what a legal artifact is, on what grounds, and within what limits? CALAEA’s distinctive contribution is to connect debates about knowledge of artifacts with the distinction between “modest” and “immodest” conceptual analysis. Modest analysis reconstructs how people understand a concept; immodest analysis seeks to establish the actual features of its subject matter. The project will investigate the hypothesis that the extent of our epistemic access helps explain when conceptual analysis can yield knowledge of the world, rather than merely of our conceptions. It will consider different theories of artifacts alongside questions of conceptual change and the deliberate revision of legal concepts. Planned outputs include a few papers intended for both legal and philosophical journals. The project involved also organizing workshops on conceptual analysis and legal philosophy called “Laboratory of Conceptual Analysis” (8 May 2026 & 20 November 2026) as well a special workshop on Ethics of Institutional Beliefs and Conceptual Analysis at international Social Ontology 2026 Conference in July 2026 (participants: G. Tuzet, M.V. Kristan, U. Mukherjee, F. Ferraro, B. Biskup and A. Dyrda). Publications: in review.