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How Do Judges Think About Risk?, W. Kip Viscusi
How Do Judges Think About Risk?, W. Kip Viscusi
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
A sample of almost 100 judges exhibited well-known patterns of biases in risk beliefs and reasonable implicit values of life. These biases and personal preferences largely do not affect attitudes toward judicial risk decisions, though there are some exceptions, such as ambiguity aversion, misinterpretation of negligence rules, and retrospective risk assessments in accident cases, which is a form of hindsight bias. Although judges avoided many pitfalls exhibited by jurors and the population at large, they nevertheless exhibited systematic errors, particularly for small probability-large loss events. These findings highlighted the importance of judicial review and the input of expert risk analysts …
Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel
Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel
Scholarly Works
Lawyers are said to travel in packs, or at least pairs, and in the popular parlance are often compared to hoards of locusts, herds of cattle, or unruly mobs. However, at least for purposes of assessing concerns with professionalism currently surrounding the bar and the public, whether attorneys are more or less social than other human animals does not matter. My point is simply that lawyers are social beings; like other human beings in social and occupational groups, lawyers behave largely in accordance with group norms, in much the same way peer pressure led Julian English toward juvenile delinquency in …