Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two‑Country Study in Adjudication Bystranowski, Piotr Rodríguez Hannikainen, Ivar Allan Experimental jurisprudence Abstract/concrete paradox Identifiability effect Judicialdecision-making Formalism Piotr Bystranowski was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the H2020 European Research Council research and innovation program, grant agreement 805498 (preparing study 1). Piotr Bystranowski, Bartosz Janik, and Maciej Prochnicki were supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland, National Programme for the Development of Humanities, from the research Grant No. 0068/NPRH4/H2b/83/2016, obtained and carried out at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland (preparing study 2). We would like to express our gratitude to the National School of Judiciary and Public Prosecution in Poland for helping us with collecting data, as well as to Tomasz Zuradzki for comments on earlier drafts of the paper. This article has also benefited from the discussion at the Ethics Research Seminar organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the abstract/concrete paradox (ACP): the tendency to activate inconsistent intuitions (and generate inconsistent judgment) depending on whether a problem to be analyzed is framed in abstract terms or is described as a concrete case. One recent study supports the thesis that this effect influences judicial decision-making, including decision-making by professional judges, in areas such as interpretation of constitutional principles and application of clear-cut rules. Here, following the existing literature in legal theory, we argue that the susceptibility to such an effect might depend on whether decision-makers operate in a legal system characterized by the formalist or particularist approach to legal interpretation, with formalist systems being less susceptible to the effect. To test this hypothesis, we compare the results of experimental studies on ACP run on samples from two countries differing in legal culture: Poland and Brazil. The lack of significant differences between those results (also for professional legal decision-makers) suggests that ACP is a robust effect in the legal context. 2021-07-06T11:02:41Z 2021-07-06T11:02:41Z 2021-06-16 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Bystranowski, P... [et al.]. Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication. Int J Semiot Law (2021). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09846-6] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/69550 10.1007/s11196-021-09846-6 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/805498 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Springer