Legal Knowledge Dissemination

Knowledge and understanding of the law by the citizens of a state is crucial for the legitimacy of governance. There are many examples of legal knowledge deficits, e.g., the lack of legal knowledge of the European Union in its citizens. In order to provide them with understandable and reliable information about the legal framework underlying the European Union, it is necessary to determine how this knowledge deficit can be remedied effectively. Large on-line collaborative environments offer unique opportunities to jointly build a body of knowledge concerning a specific topic. However, these environments feature pitfalls that have to be avoided in legal knowledge dissemination. A reputation system can guard the environment against ‘vandalism’ (destroying others’ contributions) and unreliable or false contributions, by, for instance, letting participants assess each other’s contributions. This article will investigate how a reputation system can improve the quality of collaboration in legal knowledge dissemination. It does so by using ‘applied legal epistemology’ – a framework to assess knowledge relevant to legal domains by practical translations of epistemic criteria – to build a theoretically sound reputation system. This reputation system, in its turn, is meant to optimize the implementation of a theory of legal knowledge dissemination. * [email protected] † [email protected] Laurens Mommers and Esther Hoorn 116