A common conception in the legal literature holds that in a given country, the law in force is to be understood against the background of shared beliefs about justice in that particular country. If that conception holds true, the applicable civil law in a particular country should reflect the shared views on ‘civil justice’ within that country and, as a result, citizens should reveal a preference for domestic civil law over the civil law of another country for a given case. In this research we empirically investigated to what extent the applicable law in particular cases corresponds to actual beliefs about what is seen as just in those situations. Does Dutch liability law in a particular case correspond with what citizens in the Netherlands consider to be just in that case? And does the applicable English liability law correspond to what English people consider fair in that case?
In an experiment we compared Dutch and English respondents’ views on the fairness of legal solutions in three different, hypothetical cases where Dutch and English legal solutions to the same case would diverge. We find that at the aggregate level, respondents indeed reveal a preference for the legal solution that is applicable in their own country, regardless of whether the different legal solutions are presented as applicable or not: Dutch respondents prefer Dutch civil solutions and English respondents prefer English civil solutions. However, we also observe differences between cases that make strong conclusions about a structural correspondence premature.