Law Commons^™

Dignity Takings And Dehumanization: A Social Neuroscience Perspective, Lasana T. Harris

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Dehumanization is an important element of legal theorizing about property confiscation by state or governmental authorities that result in dignity takings. Psychologists have theorized about dehumanization for decades, yet have only been able to subject the topic to empirical examination over the last 15 years or so. Moving the topic from the armchair to the laboratory has revealed a number of surprises to lay theories about dehumanization. First, everyone is capable of dehumanizing another person. Second, the social context determines when dehumanization takes place. Third, dehumanization does not always lead to negative behavior. Fourth, dehumanization is functional, allowing the completion …

Don't Call Me Crazy: A Survey Of America's Mental Health System, Justin L. Joffe

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Unfortunately, the typical exposure to mental illness for most Americans comes via tragic mass shootings or highly publicized celebrity mental breakdowns. However, the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are not violent murderers or hyper-tweeting celebrities. Rather, they are the ordinary, everyday people that make up the tens of millions of American adults suffering from some form of mental illness. The American mental health system has a lamentable history. The initial policy of locking up mentally ill individuals in jails transitioned to a system of confinement in asylums that quickly became notorious for their poor living conditions and treatment. The …

Some Limitations Of Experimental Psychologists' Criticisms Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns

Chicago-Kent Law Review

For decades, psychologists have conducted experiments that have suggested severe limitations on human cognitive capacities. Many have suggested that these results have important, and largely negative, consequences for an assessment of the reliability of the American trial. They have pointed persuasively at the disturbing number of exonerations of those convicted after trial. And some have gone on to make specific proposals for the incremental, and sometimes radical, changes in the conduct of the adversary trial. This essay places these studies, as forcefully presented by Professor Dan Simon, in a normative context, and argues that they are more powerful in suggesting …

Cognitive Bias And The Constitution, Dan M. Kahan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article uses insights from the study of risk perception to remedy a deficit in liberal constitutional theory—and vice versa. The deficit common to both is inattention to cognitive illiberalism—the threat that unconscious biases pose to enforcement of basic principles of liberal neutrality. Liberal constitutional theory can learn to anticipate and control cognitive illiberalism from the study of biases such as the cultural cognition of risk. In exchange, the study of risk perception can learn from constitutional theory that the detrimental impact of such biases is not limited to distorted weighing of costs and benefits; by infusing such determinations with …

Judicial Overstating, Dan Simon, Nicholas Scurich

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Ostensibly, we are all Legal Realists now. No longer do legal theorists maintain that judicial decision making fits the mechanical and formalist characterizations of yesteryear. Yet, the predominant style of American appellate court opinions seems to adhere to that improbable mode of adjudication: habitually, opinions provide excessively large sets of syllogistic reasons and portray the chosen decision as certain, singularly correct, and as determined inevitably by the legal materials. This article examines two possible explanations for this rhetorical style of Judicial Overstatement. First, we review the psychological research that suggests that judicial overstatement is a product of the cognitive processes …

Deference To Authority As A Basis For Managing Ideological Conflict, Tom Tyler, Margarita Krochick

Chicago-Kent Law Review

American’s are polarized in their views about a variety of social and economic issues. This raises the question how political and legal institutions can develop policies and practices that will be accepted by all the various sides to a public controversy. One approach is to build legitimacy, since people are generally more willing to defer to legitimate authorities. The results of a study in which people are asked about their willingness to accept decisions made by the Supreme Court or Congress suggests that the process through which institutions make policy decisions shapes deference in ways that are distinct from the …

Smart-Grid: Technology And The Psychology Of Environmental Behavior Change, Stephanie M. Stern

Chicago-Kent Law Review

There is a schism in the legal scholarship between scholars who argue that value, norm, and information campaigns can induce pro-environmental behavior and those who contend that structural, psychological, and social forces sharply constrain behavior change. Both sides of this debate have neglected the critical and ever-increasing role of technology in addressing residential pollution. The example of electricity "smart grids" illustrates how technology engineered to override cognitive and behavioral limitations can comprehensively reduce household consumption and emissions. Electricity conservation suffers from multiple barriers to collective action, including large numbers of geographically dispersed polluters, low financial payoffs, and, the contribution of …

Don't Bet On It: Casino's Contractual Duty To Stop Compulsive Gamblers From Gambling, Irina Slavina

Chicago-Kent Law Review

To address the problem of compulsive gambling, most states with commercial casinos have enacted statewide self-exclusion programs—a mechanism by which patrons petition to be physically removed from a casino if they are discovered on the premises. The casinos in the remaining states voluntarily instituted facility-based programs to assist problem gamblers in fighting their addiction.

But besides having any intended effect, these programs provided gamblers with a new ground for lawsuits—breach of contract. This note argues that neither states nor individual casinos should be liable to self-excluded patrons for breach of contract, even if they enter a casino and lose money …