Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Dismissals As Justice, Anna Roberts
Dismissals As Justice, Anna Roberts
Faculty Publications
More than a third of our states have given judges a little-known power to dismiss prosecutions, not because of legal or factual insufficiency, but for the sake of justice. Whether phrased as dismissals “in furtherance of justice” or dismissals of de minimis prosecutions, these exercises of judicial power teach two important lessons.
First, judges exercising these dismissals are rebutting the common notion that in the face of over-criminalization and over-incarceration they are powerless to do more than rubber-stamp prosecutorial decision making. In individual cases, they push back against some of the most problematic aspects of our criminal justice system: its …
Reclaiming The Importance Of The Defendant's Testimony: Prior Conviction Impeachment And The Fight Against Implicit Stereotyping, Anna Roberts
Faculty Publications
Implicit courtroom stereotypes are an urgent problem. When trial defendants are African American, as is disproportionately the case, they are vulnerable to implicit fact finder stereotypes that threaten the presumption of innocence: unconscious associations linking the defendants with violence, weaponry, hostility, aggression, immorality, and guilt. Implicit-social-cognition research reveals that one valuable tool in combating this threat is individuating information — information that, through methods such as defendant testimony, brings an individual to unique life.
Yet courts frequently chill defendant testimony by permitting impeachment by prior conviction. Courts determining whether criminal defendants should be impeached by their prior convictions use a …
Fitting The Forum To The Pernicious Fuss: A Dispute System Design To Address Implicit Bias And 'Isms In The Workplace, Elayne E. Greenberg
Fitting The Forum To The Pernicious Fuss: A Dispute System Design To Address Implicit Bias And 'Isms In The Workplace, Elayne E. Greenberg
Faculty Publications
This paper proposes a dispute system design to address workplace discrimination caused by implicit biases so that employees and employers involved in such disputes can secure a more responsive justice than existing legal processes are able to provide. Workplace discrimination caused by implicit bias conties to contaminate our work environment despite our focused legal efforts to combat such overt "isms" as sexism, racism, ageism, and ableism. Although overt expressions of bias have significantly decreased in recent years, expressions of implicit bias, the primary cause of workplace discrimination, persists.
This paper extends the research on implicit bias to dispute system design …