Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 2023, Vol. 43, No. 1 pp. 97–123 https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqac014 Law, Coercion and Folk Intuitions Lucas Miotto*, Guilherme FCF Almeida** and Noel Struchiner*** Abstract—In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philos- ophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive ‘enjoys widespread support among laypersons’. This is obviously an empir- ical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion. Keywords: experimental jurisprudence, legal philosophy, law and coercion, empiri- cal legal studies, general jurisprudence 1. Introduction Legal philosophers have long debated whether legal systems are necessarily coercive or only contingently so. Up until recently, the almost consensual view in anglophone analytical jurisprudence has been that legal systems are contin- gently coercive: despite our legal systems being coercive, they could have been © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com * Senior Lecturer in Law, Leeds Beckett University. Email: l.miotto@leedsbeckett.ac.uk. ** Assistant Professor at Insper Institute of Education and Research. Email: guilhermefcfa@insper.edu.br. *** Professor of Law and Philosophy, PUC-Rio. Email: noel@puc-rio.br. We would like to thank Emad Atiq, Brian Flanagan, Marcio Grandchamp, Ivar Hannikainen, Thomaz Henrique Junqueira, Joshua Knobe, Ricardo Lins Horta, Fábio Shecaira, Diego Werneck Arguelhes and the anonymous reviewers for helpful discussion and feedback. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the Yale Experimental Philosophy Lab Meeting, 1st European Experimental Philosophy Conference, FGV-Rio Law Seminar Series and Insper Law Seminar Series. We thank the audiences of these events for their engagement and comments. The experiments discussed in this article were funded by the Universiteitsfonds Limburg (SWOL) (Grant number: CoBes20.041) and by the Maastricht Law School’s Faculty Board. The involvement of Noel Struchiner was made possible through support from the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq; grant number: 309735/2019-0), the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ; grant number: E-26/201.071/2021), the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES; grant number: 001) and the DFG-CAPES research grant ‘Experimental Legal Philosophy: The Concept of Law Revisited’ (project number 88881.338585/2019-01). D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /ojls/article/43/1/97/6754881 by guest on 02 M ay 2024