Law Commons^™

Comparing The Effects Of Judges' Gender And Arbitrators' Gender In Sex Discrimination Cases And Why It Matters, Pat K. Chew

Articles

Empirical research substantiates that the judges’ gender makes a difference in sex discrimination and sexual harassment court cases. The author’s study of arbitration of sex discrimination cases administered by the American Arbitration Association between 2010 and 2014, however, finds that this judges’ “gender effect” does not occur. Namely, there is no significant difference in the decision-making patterns of female and male arbitrators as indicated by case outcomes.

The author proposes that characteristics of arbitrators, the arbitration process, and arbitration cases all combine to help explain the gender effect differences. Further, she suggests that this analysis reveals concerns about the arbitration …

Standards Of Legitimacy In Criminal Negotiations, Wesley Macneil Oliver, Rishi Batra

Faculty Articles

Scholarship on negotiation theory and practice is rich and well developed. Almost no work has been done, however, to translate to the criminal context the lessons learned about negotiation from extensive empirical study using the disciplines of economics, game theory, and psychology. This Article suggests that defense lawyers in criminal negotiations can employ tools frequently useful to negotiators in other arenas: neutral criteria as a standard of legitimacy. Judges sometimes exercise a type of discretion analogous to prosecutorial discretion. When they do so, they offer an independent, reasoned, and publicly available assessment of the factors that a prosecutor ought to …

Judicial Participation In Plea Bargaining: A Dispute Resolution Perspective, Rishi Batra

Faculty Articles

There is a common perception that judges do not or should not play a role in the criminal plea bargaining discussions between prosecutors and defense counsel. However, in many state jurisdictions, judicial participation is allowed or even encouraged by statute or by case law. This Article briefly summarizes some of the issues with the plea bargaining process, including how structural issues with the way defense counsel are appointed and compensated, along with the power of prosecutors, makes good representation for defendants less likely. By then performing a fifty-state survey of rules for judicial participation in plea bargaining, the Article explicates …

No Alternative: Resolving Disputes Japanese Style, Eric Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article critiques the simple black/white categorisation of mainstream versus alternative dispute resolution, and argues that what is needed is a cartography of dispute resolution institutions that maps the full range of approaches and traces their interaction. It sketches the first lines of such a map by describing two examples of conflict resolution in Japan. Neither can justly be called “alternative”, yet neither fits the mould of what might be called mainstream or classical dispute resolution. One, judicial settlement, focuses on process; the other, compensating victims of the Fukushima disaster, engages a specific event. Together, they help to illustrate why …

Overview Of Panel: Judges, Diplomats, And Peacebuilders: Evaluating International Dispute Resolution As A System, Anna Spain

Publications

No abstract provided.

Hearings, Mark Spottswood

Faculty Working Papers

This article explores a constantly recurring procedural question: When is fact-finding improved by a live hearing, and when would it be better to rely on a written record? Unfortunately, when judges, lawyers, and rulemakers consider this issue, they are led astray by the widely shared—but false—assumption that a judge can best determine issues of credibility by viewing the demeanor of witnesses while they are testifying. In fact, a large body of scientific evidence indicates that judges are more likely to be deceived by lying or mistaken witnesses when observing their testimony in person than if the judges were to review …

Judges Judging Judicial Candidates: Should Currently Serving Judges Participate In Commissions To Screen And Recommend Article Iii Candidates Below The Supreme Court Level?, Mary Clark

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, the American Bar Association (ABA), among others, called upon the next president to reform the federal judicial selection process by using bipartisan commissions to screen and recommend Article III candidates for presidential nomination and Senate confirmation below the Supreme Court level. This proposal may well find support in the Obama administration, given the new president’s emphasis on bipartisan consensus-building and transparency of government operations. This Article addresses one question that the ABA and others have not: Should currently serving judges participate in bi-partisan commissions to screen and recommend Article III candidates below …

Litigation And The Optimal Combination Of Vague And Precise Clauses In Contracts, Alvaro E. Bustos

Faculty Working Papers

In this paper we determine the optimal combination of precise and vague clauses written in contracts when the parties face writing and enforcement costs, the second ones in the form of litigation. We show that the parties may prefer to write vague instead of precise clauses not only because they are cheaper to write but also because they are cheaper to enforce. We extend Battigalli and Maggi (2002) to model the decision of a principal who chooses clauses to describe the actions that an agent has to perform. As both players observe nature imperfectly they may call for a court …

Judging Judges And Dispute Resolution Processes, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article critiques Professor Chris Guthrie's lead symposium article entitled, "Misjudging." Guthrie's article makes two major arguments. The first is a descriptive, empirical argument that judges are prone to error because of three types of "blinders" and that people underestimate the amount of such judicial error. The second argument is prescriptive, recommending that, because of these judicial blinders, disputants should consider using non-judicial dispute resolution processes generally, and particularly facilitative mediation and arbitration.This article critiques both arguments. It notes that, although Guthrie presents evidence that judges do make the kinds of errors that he describes, his article does not address …

Misjudging, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Judging is difficult. This is obviously so in cases where the law is unclear or the facts are uncertain. But even in those cases where the law is as clear as it can be, and where the relevant facts have been fully developed, judges might still have difficulty getting it right. Why do judges misjudge? Judges, I will argue, possess three sets of "blinders": informational blinders, cognitive blinders, and attitudinal blinders. These blinders make adjudication on the merits - by which I mean the accurate application of governing law to the facts of the case - difficult. This difficulty, in …

Blinking On The Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

How do judges judge? Do they apply law to facts in a mechanical and deliberative way, as the formalists suggest they do, or do they rely on hunches and gut feelings, as the realists maintain? Debate has raged for decades, but researchers have offered little hard evidence in support of either model. Relying on empirical studies of judicial reasoning and decision making, we propose an entirely new model of judging that provides a more accurate explanation of judicial behavior. Our model accounts for the tendency of the human brain to make automatic, snap judgments, which are surprisingly accurate, but which …

Train Our Jurors, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

Lay jurors are often legally and logically unprepared for trial. In response, it is recommended that jurors receive training in how to make better legal decisions. This chapter suggests that jurors should receive comprehensive training in critical legal doctrines and in how to reason with legal evidence. Jurors who cannot be trained to achieve minimal levels of competence (in the law or in basic reasoning) should be excused from jury service. Suggestions are given as to how policy makers and researchers who are interested in jury reform may wish to proceed.

Objecting To Court Ordered Mediation, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Maryland judges have wide discretion to refer parties to mediate a variety of civil matters. Title 17 of the Maryland Rules, enacted in 1998, governs mediation of civil cases in the circuit courts. These rules are supplemented by Maryland Rule 9-205, which addresses mediation of child custody and visitation disputes. Although these rules define mediation and address mediator qualifications in some detail, they say very little about either a party's right to object to mediation or the court's authority to compel participation in mediation.

Given that the mediation rules are relatively new and mediation orders would generally be considered interlocutory, …

The Place Of Court-Connected Mediation In A Democratic Justice System, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

A justice system, and the processes located within it, ought to deliver justice. That seems simple enough. But, of course, delivering justice is never so simple. Justice and the systems that serve it are the creatures of context.

This Article considers mediation as just one innovation within the much larger evolution of the judicial system of the United States. First, this Article outlines how the values of democratic governance undergird our traditional picture of the American justice system, presumably because the invocation of such values helps the system to deliver something that will be respected by the nation’s citizens as …

Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In this Article, Professor Sharfman addresses the problem of "discretionary valuation": that courts resolve valuation disputes arbitrarily and unpredictably, thus harming litigants and society. As a solution, he proposes the enactment of "valuation averaging," a new procedure for resolving valuation disputes modeled on the algorithmic valuation processes often agreed to by sophisticated private firms in advance of any dispute. He argues that by replacing the discretion of judges and juries with a mechanical valuation process, valuation averaging would cause litigants to introduce more plausible and conciliatory valuations into evidence and thereby reduce the cost of valuation litigation and increase the …

A More Complete Look At Complexity, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

The ability of courts to successfully resolve complex cases has been a matter of contentious debate, not only for the last quarter-century, but for most of the twentieth century. This debate has been part of the legal landscape at least since Judge Jerome Frank's polemic book from which this Symposium derives its title, and probably since Roscoe Pound's famous address to the American Bar Association. During the 1980s and 1990s in particular, the battlelines of the pro-and anti-court debate have been brightly drawn. Some commentators, most reliably successful plaintiffs' counsel and politically liberal academics, defend the judicial track record in …

Pitfalls Of Public Policy: The Case Of Arbitration Agreements, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

As the juxtaposition of these quotations suggests, judges have long held disparate views on the legitimacy and value of “public policy” considerations as a basis for legal decision making. The popular notion posits that Justice Holmes and legal realists carried the day, making public policy analysis an ordinary part of the adjudication process. The story, of course, is more complex than this legal version of Don Quixote. Many judges and lawyers, including Justice Holmes in other writings, continued to speak of adjudication in more formalist and positivist terms, with most laypersons in apparent agreement. Judge Burroughs' view of public policy …