Whereas in certain domains, the law relies on terms of art (e.g., "injunction, " "double jeopardy, " "punitive damages, " and "bankruptcy"), in others-in particular in criminal law-it invokes, or takes itself to invoke, the plain everyday meaning of the expressions used. is is unsurprising: citizens, standardly not equipped with a law degree, must understand what the law says in order to adhere to it. Furthermore, in common law jurisdictions, nonexperts help decide court cases in jury trials. And when it comes to disputes in statutory interpretation among judges, turning to ordinary meaning is one, if not-as some scholars and practitioners argue 1 -the evident strategy to resolve them. 2 According to what we term the correspondence assumption, certain central legal expressions are taken to refer to the same concepts as their corresponding ordinary language analogues (at least within designated spheres of the law). Candidate concepts for the correspondence assumption are plentiful. Consent is one. At a recent sexual misconduct trial in the United States, the judge refused to provide conceptual classification and stated that "the jury will decide what consent means to them" (Puente, Sloan, & Deerwester, 2018; for empirical work on the notion of consent, see Sommers, 2020). e expression "reasonable" and the concept it denotes constitute another example. As Gardner (2015) writes, the reasonable person standard "exists to allow the law to pass the buck, to help itself pro tempore to standards of justification that are not themselves set by the law" (p. 36). Naturally, for a maneuver of this sort to even begin to make sense, it must be assumed that the lay person's concept of reasonableness fits the law's demands. 3 In many jurisdictions, the central mens rea concepts, such as intention, are subject to the correspondence assumption-which is perhaps one of the key reasons why, very frequently, they are le partially or entirely uncodified. 4 e English courts have made this explicit stating that "the legal meaning of the word 'intention' is the ordinary meaning of the word" (Herring, 2012, p. 135). In R v. Moloney [1985], Lord Bridge put it as follows:

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts.

A growing body of literature has revealed ordinary causal judgement to be sensitive to normative factors, such that a norm-violating agent is regarded more causal than their non-norm-violating counterpart. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for this phenomenon: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. The Bias View, but not the Responsibility View, predicts features peripheral to the agent’s responsibility to impact causal attributions. In a series of three preregistered experiments (N = 1162), we present new evidence that the Norm Effect arises from such peripheral features, namely from nonpertinent or entirely silly norm violations. Furthermore, we show that this effect cannot be explained by recourse to the agent’s foreknowledge or desire of the outcome, nor by its foreseeability: the Norm Effect arises even when participants judge the norm-violating agent’s doing as equally foreseeable. This, we argue, provides evidence in favour of the Bias View.