Legal compliance · Regulatory design
Shubhangi Roy
Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg
I study how legal and regulatory systems secure compliance, and why they sometimes fail. My approach combines large-scale computational analysis of legal text with experimental and quantitative methods, drawing on empirical legal studies and law and society as much as law and economics. My work began with my PhD, where I developed an integrated theory of compliance attentive to both legal rules and the social and institutional realities that shape whether people follow them. I'm now extending that framework into corporate and environmental regulation.
Research focus
Where law, behaviour, and evidence meet
Empirical legal studies
Judgment-level datasets and quasi-experimental designs to test how legal rules actually operate, rather than how they are written to operate.
NLP over judgment corpora
Large language model based extraction pipelines applied to thousands of court decisions, turning unstructured judgment text into structured, analysable data.
Experimental methods
Vignette and quasi-experimental designs to test how people and institutions respond to law, trained through an LL.M. at Chicago and a PhD at Münster.
Selected publications
Recent work
When Do People Obey Laws: Towards an Integrated Approach to Compliance
Book monograph.
Theory of Social Proof and Legal Compliance: A Socio-Cognitive Explanation for Regulatory (Non)Compliance
Funding
Grants and fellowships
2024 – 2027
Hamburg University of Excellence Fellowship
University of Hamburg
Postdoctoral salary at TV-L 14 (senior postdoc) plus an independent research fund of €60,000 over three years.
2023
University of Münster Dissertation Prize
University of Münster
2020 – 2022
Adam Smith Fellow in Political Economy
George Mason University, Virginia, USA