Recent scientific research has revolutionised our understanding of how law can reduce misconduct. It shows that legal incentives often do not have their intended effect: stricter punishment alone often cannot deter misbehaviour, and tort liability mostly does not reduce damaging behaviour. It offers a new approach for law to address wrongdoing, incorporating social norms and morals, tapping into unconscious cognition, and applying practical and technical interventions that obstruct misconduct.

Yet, these fundamental insights continue to be ignored, and with every new disaster, scandal or major risk, we produce more rules with stronger punishment, without successfully addressing the true behavioural mechanisms at fault. The core problem is that the field of law has not made conduct central, nor produced a behavioural legal theory to guide these scientific insights into legal research, education and practice. As a result, legal rules to code conduct are made and operated by lawyers that are behaviourally illiterate.

The Homo Juridicus project, funded by the European Research Council, will instigate the necessary behavioural revolution in the field of law by developing a behavioural jurisprudence.