[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# Les catégories juridiques et la qualification : une approche cognitive

## Details

**Authors** Cumyn, Michelle and Gosselin, Frédéric

**Year** 2017

**Publisher** McGill Law Journal (Revue de droit de McGill), 62(2), 329–387

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Law & Jurisprudence

**Secondary disciplines** Cognitive Science

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.7202/1040050ar) 
10.7202/1040050ar

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To combine legal methodology with cognitive science in order to explain how jurists characterize facts under legal categories, and to test where the basic level of legal categories lies.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

Two experiments: 14 legal categories and 24 scenarios, with three groups of 35 participants.

### How they did it (methods)

Theoretical review of prototype, exemplar and theory-based accounts of categorization applied to law, plus two categorization experiments measuring response speed and category activation across areas of law.

### What they found (results)

The basic level of legal categories did not match the authors' prediction and varied by area of law. Participants trained in common law responded faster at every level. Participants did not rely on definitions and often activated several categories at once. Legal categories form overlapping hierarchies and networks, and the authors identify stereotypes as a main cost of categorization.

## Commentary

### In short

A study of how lawyers decide which legal category a set of facts belongs to. Experiments show that the most natural level of categorization differs between areas of law and that several categories are often active at once.

### Response

The paper bears most directly on distinctions, since characterization is the act of placing a situation inside or outside a category, and on systems, since the categories are arranged in overlapping hierarchies and networks with a basic level. The finding that several categories are activated at once and that the basic level varies by area of law qualifies any claim of a single fixed boundary. Perspective appears only indirectly, as the actors' purposes shape which category is chosen, and that section of the paper was not available to the reviewer, so perspectives are not claimed. The fit is partial and rests on the abstract and the publisher page.

**Patterns it shows** D, S

Shows the structure is there

**Added** 2026-10-26

**How to cite this** Cumyn, Michelle and Gosselin, Frédéric (2017). Les catégories juridiques et la qualification : une approche cognitive. McGill Law Journal (Revue de droit de McGill), 62(2), 329–387.