Kevin Tobia is a Professor of Law at Georgetown, where he teaches Legislation, Legal Philosophy, Foundations of American Legal Thought, and Torts. His scholarship has been published in the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and peer-reviewed journals of philosophy and science, including Analysis, Cognition, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His work has been discussed by casebooks and courts, including the Supreme Court, and presented to academic, professional, and public audiences internationally.

Legislation and Statutory Interpretation

Professor Tobia is an expert in statutory interpretation and writes on textualism and empirical methods in interpretation. This research has impacted legal practice. In Pulsifer v. United States, Justice Gorsuch’s dissenting opinion cited a survey-experiment presented in Professor Tobia’s co-authored piece and amicus brief. This is the first time the Court considered a survey to inform textualist analysis. In Bondi v. VanDerStok, the Court cited a linguistics amicus brief co-authored by Professor Tobia and linguists. Currently he is co-writing a book on Statutory Textualism with Professors Bill Eskridge and Brian Slocum, based on their earlier article.

 Legal Philosophy: Experimental Jurisprudence

Professor Tobia has defended “experimental jurisprudence”—a growing school of legal philosophy that complements traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods—in a forthcoming book, “Experimental Jurisprudence,” a recent Handbook, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and a law review article. Within that field, his research spans particular jurisprudence (e.g. how people judge what is “reasonable”) and general jurisprudence (e.g. lay understanding of rule of law values). His recent collaborations emphasize a comparative perspective by studying legal-philosophical intuitions across multiple languages, cultures, and jurisdictions.

 Law & Technology

He has also collaborated on a range law and technology topics: documenting the proliferation of AI-generated legal texts; evaluating judicial use of ChatGPT in legal interpretation; benchmarking LLM’s legal reasoning; and studying the psychology of legal AI. His collaboration uncovered the “human-AI fairness gap” in perceived procedural justice: Laypeople evaluate automated legal proceedings as less procedurally fair than human-led ones.

Philosophy

Professor Tobia also writes on ethics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and personal identity and the self. A series of papers uncovered the “Phineas Gage effect,” people’s tendency to evaluate negative changes as more disruptive to identity than similarly sized positive changes. He has defended “experimental philosophy,” which uses empirical methods to inform philosophical studies.