Law Commons^™

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Decades of social science research has shown that the identity of the parties in a legal action can affect case outcomes. Parties’ race, gender, class, and age all affect decisions of prosecutors, judges, juries, and other actors in a criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Less studied has been how identity might affect other forms of legal regulation. This Essay begins to explore perceptions of deceptive behavior—i.e., how wrongful it is, and the extent to which it should be regulated or punished—and the relationship of those perceptions to the gender of the actors. We hypothesize that ordinary people tend to perceive …

From Experiencing Abuse To Seeking Protection: Examining The Shame Of Intimate Partner Violence, A. Rachel Camp

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Shame permeates the experience of intimate partner violence (IPV). People who perpetrate IPV commonly use tactics designed to cause shame in their partners, including denigrating their dignity, undermining their autonomy, or harming their reputation. Many IPV survivors report an abiding sense of shame as a result of their victimization—from a lost sense of self, to self-blame, to fear of (or actual) social judgment. When seeking help for abuse, many survivors are directed to, or otherwise encounter, persons or institutions that reinforce rather than mitigate their shame. Survivors with marginalized social identities often must contend not only with the shame of …

Hannah Arendt Meets Qanon: Conspiracy, Ideology, And The Collapse Of Common Sense, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A June 2020 survey found one in four Americans agreeing that “powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.” In fall 2020, seven percent said they believe the elaborate and grotesque mythology of QAnon; another eleven percent were unsure whether they believe it. November and December 2020 found tens of millions of Americans believing in election-theft plots that would require superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy among dozens, perhaps hundreds, of otherwise-unconnected and unidentified miscreants.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, and they raise a question that preoccupied Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: whatever happened to common sense? Arendt …

Kicked Out, Kicked Again: The Discharge Review Boards’ Illiberal Application Of Liberal Consideration For Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Jessica Lynn Wherry

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In recent years, the Department of Defense (DoD) has responded to the growing awareness of mental health issues for military servicemembers during and after service. This Article focuses on veterans who have already been discharged from service, and specifically those who have been discharged under other-than-honorable conditions for misconduct that is likely the result of a mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury, sexual assault, or sexual harassment. Thousands of former servicemembers have been kicked out of the military for misconduct rather than treated for mental health conditions they experienced due to their military service. When …

(Not The) Same Old Story: Invisible Reasons For Rejecting Invisible Wounds, Jessica Lynn Wherry

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thousands of former military servicemembers have been discharged with other-than-honorable discharges due to misconduct that can be traced to a mental health condition. These veterans may request a post-discharge change to their discharge characterization—known as a “discharge upgrade.” Discharge review boards consider discharge upgrade requests and typically (90-99% of the time) deny the requests. In the past few years, the Department of Defense has issued new policy guidance partly in response to the low grant rate and to specifically address the growing understanding of the relationship between misconduct and mental health conditions for military servicemembers. The policy guidance requires the …

Discounting Credibility: Doubting The Stories Of Women Survivors Of Sexual Harassment, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, federal and state laws have prohibited sexual harassment on the job; despite this fact, extraordinarily high rates of gender-based workplace harassment still permeate virtually every sector of the American workforce. Public awareness of the seriousness and scope of the problem increased astronomically in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as women began to publicly share countless stories of harassment and abuse. In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace published an important study analyzing a wide range of factors contributing to this phenomenon. But the study devotes only limited …

Capitalizing On Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case For Law Firms To Promote And Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being, Jarrod F. Reich

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article is the first to make the business case for firms to promote and prioritize lawyer well-being. For more than three decades, quantitative research has demonstrated that lawyers suffer from depression, anxiety, and addiction far in excess of the general population. Since that time, there have been many calls within and outside the profession for changes to be made to promote, prioritize, and improve lawyer well-being, particularly as many aspects of the current law school and law firm models exacerbate mental health and addiction issues, as well as overall law student and lawyer distress. These calls for change, made …

Brief Of Amicus Curiae 290 Criminal Law And Mental Health Law Professors In Support Of Petitioner's Request For Reversal And Remand, Kahler V. Kansas, 18-6135 (U.S. June 6, 2019), Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Amici curiae are a group of philosophically and politically diverse law school professors and scholars in the fields of criminal law and mental health from a variety of disciplines who have been teaching and writing about the insanity defense and related issues throughout their careers. They include the authors of leading criminal law and mental health law treatises and casebooks and numerous important scholarly books and articles.

Amici believe this case raises important questions about principles of criminal responsibility, the integral role of the insanity defense in Anglo-American law, and the inadequacy of the “mens rea alternative” to the traditional …

Adverse Childhood Experiences In The New Mexico Juvenile Justice Population, Yael Cannon, George Davis, Andrew Hsi, Alexandra Bochte

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Faculty from the University of New Mexico (UNM) School of Law and the UNM School of Medicine, and New Mexico’s Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) initiated a joint project to look at the prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) nationally and in New Mexico. The study was intended to better establish the association between early childhood trauma and delinquency, as well as to explore the role that law and medicine can play in ensuring better health and juvenile justice outcomes for children who have experienced ACEs.

Law's Emotions, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The emerging interdisciplinary field of “Law and Emotions” brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law’s various relations to our emotions and to emotional life: they share a passion for law’s passions. They also share the critical premise, or assumption, that most legal scholars of at least the last half century, with a few exceptions, have mistakenly accorded too great of a role to reason, rationality, and the cool calculations of self interest, and have accorded too small a role to emotion, to the creation, the imagining, the …

Behavioral Ethics, Behavioral Compliance, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The design of an effective legal compliance system for an organization fearing prosecution for white-collar crime or regulatory violations requires skill at predicting human behavior. It is entirely plausible to use the economist’s simplifying assumptions of rational choice and pecuniary self-interest in making these predictions. But the realism of these assumptions has been under attack for decades now, suggesting that we should at least consider more nuanced behavioral possibilities when designing and implementing compliance programs. The label “behavioral compliance” can be attached to the design and management of compliance that draws from this wider range of behavioral predictions about individual …

Those Awful Tahrir Rapes, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay highlights the myriad ways in which street sexual harassment of women in Egypt, of which I argue the mass rapes of Tahrir are an egregious instance thereof, disciplines women's bodies. It describes briefly and dismisses the frameworks for understanding those practices proposed by the left, the right and the government. I also describe the role that law, in conjunction with its lax enforcement, plays in intensifying this regulation.

The essay uses purposefully the fighting radical feminist pronoun "we" to describe the predicament. I "am" an Egyptian women. I consider myself an ally in their attempt to understand, resist …

Criminalizing Normal Adolescent Behavior In Communities Of Color: The Role Of Prosecutors In Juvenile Justice Reform, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is little dispute that racial disparities pervade the contemporary American juvenile justice system. The persistent overrepresentation of youth of color in the system suggests that scientifically supported notions of diminished culpability of youth are not applied consistently across races. Drawing from recent studies on implicit bias and the impact of race on perceptions of adolescent culpability, Professor Henning contends that contemporary narratives portraying black and Hispanic youth as dangerous and irredeemable lead prosecutors to disproportionately reject youth as a mitigating factor for their behavior. Although racial disparities begin at arrest and persist through every stage of the juvenile justice …

The Legal Significance Of The Psychological Ability To Appreciate The “Other”, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recently the U.S. Supreme Court, citing neurological and psychological studies, held that because juveniles are deficient in appreciating consequences to others, they should never be given the death penalty. The author found, in his years as a legal scholar, educator, and practitioner, that “appreciating the ‘other’”--putting oneself in the position of others---is critical to law and the study of law in more than the obvious ways.

The author became aware of empirical studies and psychological experiments demonstrating that children below a certain age have trouble seeing things from another’s vantage point, and found that the facility to do so develops …

Juvenile Justice After Graham V. Florida: Keeping Due Process, Autonomy, And Paternalism In Balance, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal disputes involving children invariably evoke a complex matrix of issues such as child and adolescent capacity, individual rights and autonomy, parental authority, and in the criminal justice context-diminished culpability for a minor's actions. While it is difficult to identify a clear and cohesive jurisprudence regarding the balance between children's autonomy and children's vulnerability across Supreme Court cases, a series of cases over the last decade, including Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and J.D.B. v. North Carolina, offer a more consistent view of children as vulnerable, malleable, and in need of protection, at least in the …

Dangerous People Or Dangerous Weapons: Access To Firearms For Persons With Mental Illness, Lawrence O. Gostin, Katherine L. Record

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has once again focused the nation’s attention on the danger of the wide availability of firearms. The Supreme Court has ruled that gun restrictions may only be imposed on those deemed “prohibited persons” under the Gun Control Act of 1968. Although some are easily identifiable (e.g., children, convicted felons), one widely inclusive group is not – the mentally ill.

The current system designed to bar the mentally ill from purchasing or possessing firearms is ineffectual due to a lack of reporting and the existence of loopholes. What’s more, no state has developed …

The Behavioral Economics Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The world of mergers and acquisitions seems like a setting in which rationality necessarily dominates. There are high stakes, focused and sustained attention, and expert advisers who are repeat players. In the economics and management literature, however, there has been a great deal of research on what might be called “behavioral M&A”—using insights from psychology to explain observed patterns of behavior in the acquisitions marketplace. To date, the law has largely been uninterested in the psychological dynamics of corporate acquisitions. This essay looks at recent research on such issues as the role of overconfidence, hubris, anchoring, etc. in explaining buy-side …

Love As Legal Methodology: Comments On Love In A Time Of Envy, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In academic papers about emotion, it is not uncommon to find a kind of disconnect between the detachment of theoretical and scholarly language and the subject of the paper--the emotions. One of the lovely, and challenging, aspects of Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller's article is that it not only conveys the emotions that are its subject, but it brims with its own emotion; it reads like a text written out of shattered love. Goldberg-Hiller takes up Jean-Luc Nancy's contention that "love is shattered by its very essence. It fragments the self at the same time as it refracts into many forms." Goldberg-Hiller understands …

Conspiracy Theory, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Over one-quarter of all federal criminal prosecutions and a large number of state cases involve prosecutions for conspiracy. Yet, the major scholarly articles and the bulk of prominent jurists have roundly condemned the doctrine. This Article offers a functional justification for the legal prohibition against conspiracy, centering on psychological and economic accounts. Advances in psychology over the past thirty years have demonstrated that groups cultivate a special social identity. This identity often encourages risky behavior, leads individuals to behave against their self-interest, solidifies loyalty, and facilitates harm against non-members. So, too, economists have developed sophisticated explanations for why firms promote …

Foreword: Law, Psychology, And The Emotions, Heidi Li Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Given that law is made by and for people, the relatively little attention lawyers, judges, and legal scholars have paid to human psychology is surprising. Too often, legal writers have either presupposed or borrowed impoverished conceptions of human nature, erecting legal theories for people presumptively possessed of the requisite nature, regardless of the psychology of the actual persons who make and live under the law. Even when they do attend to human nature, legal scholars tend to ignore the centrality of emotions, dispositions, fantasies, and wishes to human psychology. The articles in this Symposium are united by their authors' resistance …

Taking Myths Seriously: An Essay For Lawyers, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The specific idea I want to explore has to do with the motivational power of myths and illusions on a personal level. To take a mundane example, people are often told to "believe in themselves." The underlying idea seems to be that high self confidence is an important motivator, especially in competitive settings like school, sports, business and the professions. This is not the idle talk of family and friends; millions of dollars are spent each year by people and their employers on motivational books and programs that offer endless variations on this simple theme in an effort to bolster …

Foreword: Public Health & The Law—A Symposium Dedicated To Professor William J. Curran, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay serves as the foreword to Public Health & the Law, a symposium dedicated to Professor William J. Curran held in 1987.

During his career, Professor Curran chaired the Harvard School of Public Health Committee on Human Research; he directed the Program in Law and Public Health; and he was co-director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program in Medical Ethics from 1973 to 1980. He was also an advisor to the World Health Organization and spent two sabbatical periods in Europe with WHO organizations. He advised and lectured in countries throughout the world.

At Harvard Law School and at …

Contemporary Social Historical Perspectives On Mental Health Reform, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The argument presented in this article is that a new role has been developing in law which can and should be used as a strategy in the provision of services. It will be further argued that there is an important place for the law in setting limits on established psychiatric measures relating, for example, to compulsory admission and treatment, and even to particularly hazardous measures taken with the consent of the patient. The final role of law is to ensure the civil status of those who are the consumers of psychiatric services. One must accept the fact that pernicious legal …

Compulsory Treatment In Psychiatry: Some Reflections On Self-Determination, Patient Competency And Professional Expertise, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article the author examines the rationale, in legal and policy terms, of the inextricable association traditionally formed between certification and incompetency. He argues that forming categories of people in which the law automatically dispenses with the requirement of seeking consent is fraught with conceptual inconsistencies and practical difficulties. He further argues that clinical judgments made without the consent of the patient should be made subject to an independent statutory review. Such a review procedure could also be adopted for treatments which are unusually hazardous, irreversible or not fully established even if the doctor purports to proceed with the …

A Mental Patient's Right To Vote: An Analysis Of The Wild Case, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is an analysis of the Wild case that was heard on 15 June 1976 by Judge Lloyd Jones of the County Court, Warrington.

In order to vote, the person's name must appear on the register of electors as a resident of a particular locality. Any place where the elector legitimately resides (even a hostel, a general hospital or a university) may be used as an address which qualifies a person for entry onto the register. The one exception is found in section 4(3) of the Representation of the People Act 1949, as amended by the Mental Health Act, …

Freedom Of Expression And The Mentally Disordered: Philosophical And Constitutional Perspectives, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mental illness is usually described as an impaired ability to communicate effectively. Yet the societal response--both historically and under modem psychiatric practice--has been to retard, rather than encourage, the acquisition of linguistic skills. This impediment to normal social intercourse leaves individual interests in free expression ineffectuated; it concerns the legal profession because the government condones and enforces the restriction of first amendment rights in a potentially large segment of the population. This article examines the philosophical justification for free communication for the mentally handicapped. It further suggests a systematic application of the first amendment to the particular problems of the …

The Constitutional Right To Free Communication Of The Institutionalized Resident, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article comes from the notes and comments section of the North Carolina Central Law Journal from 1973.

Justified by the generic first amendment protection to unabridged expression and association, a United States citizen cannot be unreasonably denied the right to communicate by mail; by telephone; with legal counsel; with the opposite sex; with others. In most states where such a citizen becomes "mentally ill," the person may be involuntarily civilly committed. Although there is no justification for such a commitment beyond the fact that the individual is sick and is in need of care, often the individual's first amendment …