Ignorance of Law Does Not Excuse: A New Empirical Account

Abstract

Not knowing what is expected of one should limit one's responsibility for not complying; yet ignorance of law is no excuse. Existing literature in law and philosophy often assumes that people intuitively accept these two seemingly inconsistent propositions. In this research, across one exploratory and three pre-registered confirmatory studies, I consistently observe two patterns: 1) information that an agent was ignorant of a social rule they have not conformed with reduces the ascription of agent's desert, the act's wrongness and even the extent to which the action is seen as a rule violation; 2) all these effects are moderated by the perceived degree to which a given rule is a typical legal rule. The more lawlike a rule is perceived, the less exculpatory power normative ignorance has. Exploring potential explanations for these patterns, I find that the exculpatory effect of normative ignorance is largely mediated by the accompanying change in the perceived publicity (public knowledge) of the rule. At the same time, the publicity ratings of lawlike rules are more sticky. As I show in the final study, people tend substantially to overestimate the publicity of obscure legal rules. I argue that this new empirical account of ignorance of law is superior to some earlier theoretical contributions, and it aligns with experimental jurisprudence literature suggesting that people perceive law as necessarily public.

Keywords: gnorance of law, normative ignorance, rule violation, responsibility, experimental jurisprudence, social rules