Law Commons^™

America's Newest Boogeyman For Deviant Teen Behavior: Violent Video Games And The First Amendment, Joseph C. Alfe, Grant D. Talabay

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

Are violent video games harming America’s youth? Is it possible a series of interconnected circuit boards can influence children (or even adults) to become, themselves, violent? If so, how should our society-- and government-- respond?

To properly answer this last query, violent video games must be viewed through the lens of the First Amendment. Simply put: do games depicting grotesque acts of depravity so profound as to negatively influence the psyche warrant the full constitutional protections ordinarily guaranteed under the mantle of free speech and expression? Are these guarantees without limit? If not, how far may the government go in …

Ordinary People And The Rationalization Of Wrongdoing, Janice Nadler

Michigan Law Review

Review of Yuval Feldman's The Law of Good People: Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior.

Saliency, Anchors & Frames: A Multicomponent Damages Experiment, Bernard Chao

Michigan Technology Law Review

Modern technology products contain thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of different features. Nonetheless, when electronics manufacturers are sued for patent infringement, these suits typically accuse only one feature, or in more complex suits, a handful of features, of actual patent infringement. But damages verdicts often do not reflect the relatively small contribution an individual patent makes to an infringing product. One study observed that verdicts in these types of cases average 9.98% of the price of the entire product. While both courts and commentators have blamed the law of patent damages, the role cognitive biases play in these outsized damages …

Privacy Preserving Social Norm Nudges, Yifat Nahmias

Michigan Technology Law Review

Nudges comprise a key component of the regulatory toolbox. Both the public and private sectors use nudges extensively in various domains, ranging from environmental regulation to health, food and financial regulation. This article focuses on a particular type of nudge: social norm nudges. It discusses, for the first time, the privacy risks of such nudges. Social norm nudges induce behavioral change by capitalizing on people’s desire to fit in with others, on their predisposition to social conformity, and on their susceptibility to the way information is framed. In order to design effective social norm nudges, personal information about individuals and …

Nudge-Proof: Distributive Justice And The Ethics Of Nudging, Jessica L. Roberts

Michigan Law Review

A review of Cass R. Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science.

The Myth Of The Ideal Investor, Elisabeth De Fontenay

Seattle University Law Review

Critiques of specific investor behavior often assume an ideal investor against which all others should be compared. This ideal investor figures prominently in the heated debates over the impact of investor time horizons on firm value. In much of the commentary, the ideal is a longterm investor that actively monitors management, but the specifics are typically left vague. That is no coincidence. The various characteristics that we might wish for in such an investor cannot peacefully coexist in practice. If the ideal investor remains illusory, which of the real-world investor types should we champion instead? The answer, I argue, is …

Addressing Barriers To Cultural Sensibility Learning: Lessons From Social Cognition Theory, Andrea A. Curcio

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Tmi? Why The Optimal Architecture Of Disclosure Remains Tbd, Ryan Bubb

Michigan Law Review

We are inundated with disclosures in our daily lives. In one of the more evocative passages in their stimulating new book, More Than You Wanted to Know, Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider imagine a day in the life of someone who actually reads all those disclosures (pp. 95–100). During a commercial on the morning news, the protagonist hits pause on the TiVo to catch the fine print that would otherwise fly by. Breakfast is a slog, requiring close reading of the toaster’s ominous label and the disheartening nutrition facts on the butter and jam. More of the same awaits …

Subtly Selling The System: Where Psychological Influence Tactics Lurk In Judicial Writing, Anne E. Mullins

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Personalizing Default Rules And Disclosure With Big Data, Ariel Porat, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Michigan Law Review

This Article provides the first comprehensive account of personalized default rules and personalized disclosure in the law. Under a personalized approach to default rules, individuals are assigned default terms in contracts or wills that are tailored to their own personalities, characteristics, and past behaviors. Similarly, disclosures by firms or the state can be tailored so that only information likely to be relevant to an individual is disclosed and information likely to be irrelevant to her is omitted. The Article explains how the rise of Big Data makes the effective personalization of default rules and disclosure far easier than it would …

The Transformative Potential Of Attorney Bilingualism, Jayesh M. Rathod

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In contemporary U.S. law practice, attorney bilingualism is increasingly valued, primarily because it allows lawyers to work more efficiently and to pursue a broader range of professional opportunities. This purely functionalist conceptualization of attorney bilingualism, however, ignores the surprising ways in which multilingualism can enhance a lawyer's professional work and can strengthen and reshape relationships among actors in the U.S. legal milieu. Drawing upon research from psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines, this Article advances a theory of the transformative potential of attorney bilingualism. Looking first to the development of lawyers themselves, the Article posits that attorneys who operate bilingually may, …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims ofintimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth. While the situation that gave rise to the battered womens movement in the 1970s is often presumed to …

The Wizard And Dorothy, Patton And Rommel: Negotiation Parables In Fiction And Fact, H. Lee Hetherington

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is The Prosecution Of War Crimes Just And Effective? Rethinking The Lessons From Sociology And Psychology, Ziv Bohrer

Michigan Journal of International Law

Should perpetrators of genocide, violent acts against civilians during war, or other massive violations of core human rights be punished? International criminal law (ICL) answers this question affirmatively, asserting that the punishment of such atrocities is just and that their effective prosecution can (and should) contribute to the prevention of such future acts. Moreover, an increasing attempt has been made in the international and domestic arenas to act in accordance with these assertions of ICL through the prosecution of war crimes. During the last two decades the role of ICL has become gradually more significant, and the fall of the …

Our Founding Feelings: Emotion, Commitment, And Imagination In Constitutional Culture, Doni Gewirtzman

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Technology Wars: The Failure Of Democratic Discourse, Gregory N. Mandel

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Conflicts over the use and regulation of various technologies pervade public discourse and have dramatic implications for the public interest. Controversies over the regulation of genetically modified products, nuclear power, and nanotechnology, among others, provoke some of the most socially and politically volatile debates of our time. These technology conflicts extract a substantial price from society--they create costly inefficiencies, prevent society from optimally managing new technologies, consume vast resources, and retard technological growth. This Article develops a framework for understanding technology controversies, and consequently proposes new means for resolving or ameliorating a variety of seemingly intractable legal and regulatory standoffs. …

Regret Theory - Explanation, Evaluation And Implications For The Law, Grant B. Gelberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note discusses regret theory, which offers an alternative explanation of rational behavior in risky or uncertain situations. Unlike traditional law and economics, which is based on expected utility theory, regret theory posits that individuals either rejoice or experience regret after making a decision, and that the anticipation of these feelings influences choices ex ante. In recent years, studies have shown the robustness of regret theory, particularly when individuals compare action to inaction, in disparate feedback environments, and when decisional agency is altered. These, and other factors, influence regret theory's impact on litigant behavior, as well as on the …

Law, Self-Pollution, And The Management Of Social Anxiety, Geoffrey P. Miller

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This article considers the anxieties about masturbation and spermatorrhoea from the standpoint of cultural-legal analysis. Seen from this perspective, the worries about masturbation provided an object onto which social anxieties could be displaced and thereby managed. Norm entrepreneurs who played on public fears manipulated basic cultural polarities in order to present masturbation and spermatorrhoea as objects of horror and disgust-things that needed to be expelled, if possible, from the body social.

Redefining The Family: Recognizing The Altruistic Caretaker And The Importance Of Relational Needs, Beverly Horsburgh

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Part I of this Article describes the general nonrecognition of altruism in the law. It then focuses on contract law, discussing cases involving parties who cohabitate without formalizing their relationship in a marriage, and those who are not sexually intimate but are nevertheless interrelated members of an extended family. I argue that when a relationship ends, a caretaker becomes aware of her sacrifice and effort on behalf of another and experiences a sense of loss. However, recovery in contract requires the perverse recharacterization of the parties as self-seeking strangers impersonally bargaining over market services in a commodity exchange. Courts indulge …

Understanding Legal Compliance, V. Lee Hamilton

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Why People Obey the Law by Tom R. Tyler

Beyond Candor, Scott Altman

Michigan Law Review

In Part I, I consider whether judges might hold inaccurate beliefs that make them more candid and constrained. I suggest that even if theories of neutral decisionmaking are incomplete and inaccurate, a legal system in which judges hold these beliefs about their own behavior could have advantages. If many judges believe that they can, should, and do decide almost all cases by following the law, they might behave differently than they would if they held more accurate beliefs. They might behave so as to facilitate repression and denial, because their self-esteem depends on maintaining the belief that they decide as …

Of Literature, Politics, And Crime, Francis A. Allen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil

Born To Crime: The Genetic Causes Of Criminal Behavior, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Born to Crime: The Genetic Causes of Criminal Behavior by Lawrence Taylor

A Rational Approach To Responsibility, Christopher Slobogin

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship by Michael S. Moore

Understanding The Jury With The Help Of Social Science, Stephen Saltzburg

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Inside the Jury by Reid Hastie, Steven Penrod and Nancy Pennington

Legal Psychology: Eyewitness Testimony--Jury Behavior, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Legal Psychology: Eyewitness Testimony--Jury Behavior by L. Craig Parker

The Uses Of Psychiatry In The Law: A Clinical View Of Forensic Psychiatry, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Uses of Psychiatry in the Law: A Clinical View of Forensic Psychiatry by Walter Bromberg

On Tapp (And Levine), Michael J. Saks

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Law, Justice, and the Individual in Society: Psychological and Legal Issues edited by June Louin Tapp and Felice J. Levine

Driver Behavior And Legal Sanctions: A Study Of Deterrence, Roger C. Cramton

Michigan Law Review

This Article considers first the general understanding of legal scholars and criminologists regarding the deterrent effect of legal sanctions; a second part summarizes current knowledge concerning the effects of legal sanctions in controlling driver behavior; and a concluding section evaluates briefly the methods available for the development of needed new knowledge.

Schur: Crimes Without Victims: Deviant Behavior And Public Policy, Mauris M. Platkin M.D.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Crimes Without Victims: Deviant Behavior and Public Policy by Edwin M. Schur