RECOGNISE

The main objective of RECOGNISE is to develop a training curriculum on legal reasoning and cognitive science filling this gap. The training will be targeted at newly graduated, post-graduates and Master students, PhD students, Post-doc researchers, teaching staff in Law Departments, as well as legal professionals (in particular, barristers and judges).
This objective will be achieved through the production of three intellectual outputs:
IO1: a training curriculum on legal reasoning and cognitive science, articulated in three different formats: Intensive Study Program (5-10 days training); LLM Course (3-6 months training); E-learning Course (15-20 video-lectures);
IO2: an online handbook, providing comprehensive and practice-oriented information on the relevant topics; the handbook will be freely accessible on the project's online platform;
IO3: an online platform, which will gather all the project's material, including the handbook, and video-lectures and other teaching materials of the e-learning course.
Both the training format and the handbook are organized within a general framework articulated in six thematic units: 1. Heuristics and biases in adjudication; 2. Emotions and adjudication; 3. Intuition and legal reasoning; 4. The cognitive structure of legal concepts; 5. Defeasible reasoning, law, cognitive science; 6. Legal reasoning, cognitive science, Artificial Intelligence.
As intermediate steps in the development of the project, we plan to realize: (i) two Intensive Study Programs, the first in Ljubljana and the second in Palermo, with the collaboration of the local Bar Associations; (ii) a public presentation of the online platform, to be held in Maastricht.
At the end of the project, a final conference, to be held in Krakow, will summarize and disseminate the outcomes of the project.
The project consortium gathers six academic partners with excellent and complementary expertise on the addressed topics: the University of Palermo (leading organisation), the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, the University of Bologna, the Maastricht University, the University of Alicante, the University of Ljubljana. In order to assure a tight exchange between theoretical and practical perspectives, two Bar Associations (Palermo's and Ljubljana's) will participate to the project as associated partners.

RECOGNISE aims at developing an interdisciplinary training curriculum on legal reasoning and cognitive science, filling a gap in legal higher education. It is a strategic partnership of six European universities for higher education sponsored by the ERASMUS+ Programme. The project will provide the interested learners (legal researchers, law students, legal practitioners, and beyond) with introductory and advanced materials on topics including heuristics and biases in adjudication, cognitive structure of legal concepts, and defeasible reasoning in law. Materials will be provided in the form of an online handbook, video lectures, summer schools, and other online and on-campus activities.