Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 61 - 79 of 79

Full-Text Articles in Law

Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1995

Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The jury's competence, unlike that of the judge, rests partly on its ability to reflect the perspectives, experiences, and values of the ordinary people in the community - not just the most common or typical community perspective, but the whole range of viewpoints.


Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller Jan 1995

Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller

Articles

With the exception of St Augustine and perhaps Abelard, often praised as modern before their time, it is not unusual to find it maintained that the individual was not available in any serious conceptual, psychological or even sociological way before the seventeenth century. Our thick and deep self, according to this view, is thus a rather recent phenomenon. Some more expansive souls find the individual already emerging a century earlier, during the Reformation. Within the last three decades, medievalists, chagrined at being contemned by classicists on one flank and an alliance of Renaissance scholars, early modernists, modernists and post-modernists on …


Stress And Health In 1st-Year Law Students: Women Fare Worse, Daniel N. Mcintosh, Julie Keywell, Alan Reifman, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1994

Stress And Health In 1st-Year Law Students: Women Fare Worse, Daniel N. Mcintosh, Julie Keywell, Alan Reifman, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The social and psychological consequences of being a female law student may include greater stress and worse health than that experienced by male students. First-year law students at a major state university were surveyed about their physical and psychological health prior to, in the middle of, and at the end of the school year. They were also asked about specific sources of strain (e.g., grades, time pressure) at mid-year. Relative to men, women reported greater strain due to sexism, lack of free time, and lack of time to spend with one’s spouse/partner. Women also displayed more depression and physical symptoms …


'I Can Take A Hint': Social Ineptitude, Embarrassment, And The King Of Comedy, William I. Miller Jan 1994

'I Can Take A Hint': Social Ineptitude, Embarrassment, And The King Of Comedy, William I. Miller

Articles

The phrase "I can take a hint," when said seriously, contains its own denial. It reveals that the speaker has not been very adept at recognizing the hints already given, nor very graceful about not making a scene once he has recognized them. Its very utterance has the effect of punishing the hint-giver by making her hint fail as a hint. The truly successful hint works by gaining its end with no extra awkwardness added to the social encounter. The good hint should be barely perceived by the person toward whom it is directed. We could even say that it …


Hardening Of The Attitudes: Americans' Views On The Death Penalty, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Samuel R. Gross Jan 1994

Hardening Of The Attitudes: Americans' Views On The Death Penalty, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

American support for the death penalty has steadily increased since 1966, when opponents outnumbered supporters, and now in the mid-1990s is at a near record high. Research over the last 20 years has tended to confirm the hypothesis that most people’s death penalty attitudes (pro or con) are based on emotion rather than information or rational argument. People feel strongly about the death penalty, know little about it, and feel no need to know more. Factual information (e.g., about deterrence and discrimination) is generally irrelevant to people’s attitudes, and they are aware that this is so. Support for the death …


Real Jurors' Understanding Of The Law In Real Cases, Alan Reifman, Spencer M. Gusick, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1992

Real Jurors' Understanding Of The Law In Real Cases, Alan Reifman, Spencer M. Gusick, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

A survey of 224 Michigan citizens called for jury duty over a 2-month period was conducted to assess the jurors' comprehension of the law they had been given in the judges' instructions. Citizens who served as jurors were compared with a base line of those who were called for duty but not selected to serve, and with those who served on different kinds of cases. Consistent with previous studies of mock jurors, this study found that actual jurors understand fewer than half of the instructions they receive at trial. Subjects who received judges' instructions performed significantly better than uninstructed subjects …


'Coming To Our Senses': Communication And Legal Expression In Performance Cultures, Bernard J. Hibbitts Jan 1992

'Coming To Our Senses': Communication And Legal Expression In Performance Cultures, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

This article examines how semi-literate or largely non-literate cultures having little or no experience with writing ("performance cultures") communicate and express law and legal meaning through the orchestrated use of the physical senses. It first examines how each of the senses - hearing (sound), sight, touch, smell and taste - is brought to bear in the cultural and legal experience of performance-based societies. It then considers how and why members of performance cultures "perform", i.e. use and combine various sensory media in single messages, and describes how and why they use the same strategy in creating law and legal expression. …


Getting To No: A Study Of Settlement Negotiations And The Selection Of Cases For Trial, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud Jan 1991

Getting To No: A Study Of Settlement Negotiations And The Selection Of Cases For Trial, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud

Articles

A trial is a failure. Although we celebrate it as the centerpiece of our system of justice, we know that trial is not only an uncommon method of resolving disputes, but a disfavored one. With some notable exceptions, lawyers, judges, and commentators agree that pretrial settlement is almost always cheaper, faster, and better than trial. Much of our civil procedure is justified by the desire to promote settlement and avoid trial. More important, the nature of our civil process drives parties to settle so as to avoid the costs, delays, and uncertainties of trial, and, in many cases, to agree …


To Tell What We Know Or Wait For Godot?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1991

To Tell What We Know Or Wait For Godot?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

Professor Elliott raises two questions about the American Psychological Association's practice of submitting amicus briefs to the courts. First, are our data sufficiently valid, consistent, and generalizable to be applicable to the real world issues? Second, are amicus briefs adequate to communicate scientific findings? The first of these is not a general question, but must be addressed anew each time the Association considers a new issue. An evaluation of the quality and sufficiency of scientific knowledge about racial discrimination, for example, tells us nothing at all about the quality and sufficiency of scientific knowledge about sexual abuse. "Are the data …


Some Implications Of Cognitive Psychology For Risk Regulation, Roger G. Noll, James E. Krier Jan 1990

Some Implications Of Cognitive Psychology For Risk Regulation, Roger G. Noll, James E. Krier

Articles

Beginning with a set of books and articles published in the 1950s, cognitive psychologists have developed a new descriptive theory of how people make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty. A dominant theme in the theory is that most people do not evaluate risky circumstances in the manner assumed by conventional decision theory-they do not, that is, seek to maximize the expected value of some function when selecting among actions with uncertain outcomes. The purpose of this article is to consider some implications of the cognitive theory for regulatory policies designed to control risks to life, health, and the …


Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1989

Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

Few advocates of the jury system would argue that the average juror is as competent a tribunal as the averagejudge. Whatever competence the jury has is a function of two of its attributes: its number and its interaction. The fact that a jury must be composed of at least six people,' with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, provides some protection against decisions based on an idiosyncratic view of the facts. Not only must the jury include at least six people, but they must be chosen in a manner that conforms to the ideal of the jury as representative of community …


Comments On Parfit, Donald H. Regan Jan 1982

Comments On Parfit, Donald H. Regan

Articles

I will begin by saying that I am persuaded by most of Derek's claims and arguments. That may tend to make for rather uninteresting commentary, but I shall try to find something to say. I shall offer only one criticism of the main part of Derek's paper, and then I shall discuss at somewhat greater length the questions he raises in the last section of his paper. In the main body of the paper, Derek attempts to prove that if we accept what he calls the Complex View of personal identity, then we must abandon what he calls the Equal …


Trial-Type Ceremonies And Defendant Behavior: 'Moralizing' And 'Cooling In' In An Eviction Setting, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1977

Trial-Type Ceremonies And Defendant Behavior: 'Moralizing' And 'Cooling In' In An Eviction Setting, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This study uses hearing transcripts to examine judge-defendant interaction in a trial-type setting. The setting is a public housing eviction hearing; judges are eviction board members and defendants are tenants facing eviction for non-payment of rent. All tenants in the sample were formally evicted, but in each case the execution of the eviction order was stayed on the condition that the tenant pay his rent. Two forms of verbal interaction are identified. The first, “moralizing” is deemed present when one or more board members directs a degrading remark toward the tenant. The second, “cooling in” is deemed present when one …


Sterilization, State Action, And The Concept Of Consent, Monroe E. Price, Robert A. Burt Jan 1975

Sterilization, State Action, And The Concept Of Consent, Monroe E. Price, Robert A. Burt

Articles

A line demarking the propriety of state intervention into the lives of individuals has never been adequately drawn. It is not surprising that such a line is practically nonexistent, from the point of view of legal analysis, when the people subject to intervention are considered mentally retarded. Too infrequently the medical and privacy rights of these individuals go unrecognized and unheeded. There are several factors which collectively account for this.


Alternatives To Civil Commitment Of The Mentally Ill: Practical Guides And Constitutional Imperatives, David L. Chambers Jan 1972

Alternatives To Civil Commitment Of The Mentally Ill: Practical Guides And Constitutional Imperatives, David L. Chambers

Articles

In 1930, Ford sold Fords only in black and states offered treatment for mental illness only in public mental hospitals. Today, new views of mental health care and mental health problems have begotten a galaxy of new treatment settings. Few cities can boast community-based programs sufficient to meet their needs, but almost all cities of any size rely increasingly on outpatient programs. The large public mental hospitals still stand, of course. Indeed, every year more people enter public hospitals than entered the year before. Over 400,000 Americans were admitted as inpatients to state and county mental hospitals last year.1 Partly …


Emotional Disturbance As Legal Damage, Herbert F. Goodrich Jan 1922

Emotional Disturbance As Legal Damage, Herbert F. Goodrich

Articles

MENTAL pain or anxiety the law cannot value, and does not pretend to redress, when the unlawful act complained of causes that alone. Lord Wensleydale's famous dictum in Lynch v. Knight will serve as a starting point for this discussion. His lordship's notion of mental pain is evidently that of a "state of mind" or feeling, hidden in the inner consciousness of the individual; an intangible, evanescent something too elusive for the hardheaded workaday common law to handle. Likewise, in that very interesting problem regarding recovery for damages sustained through fright, it is always assumed, tacitly or expressly, that mere …


Fright Without Physical Impact But Resulting In Physical Injury, Joseph H. Drake Jan 1910

Fright Without Physical Impact But Resulting In Physical Injury, Joseph H. Drake

Articles

The recent Maryland case of Green v. T. A. Shoemaker & Co., reported in 73 Atlantic Reporter, 688, (June, 1909) puts this jurisdiction squarely on the side of those courts that do allow recovery for fright alone, if physical injury is caused thereby. The court confesses that "the numerical weight of authority supports the general rule that there can be no recovery for nervous affections unaccompanied by contemporaneous physical injury," but nevertheless holds firmly with the minority of the courts to the view that there are exceptions to this rule and that this case falls within the exceptions.


Statutory Abolition Of Defense Of Insanity In Criminal Cases, John R. Rood Jan 1910

Statutory Abolition Of Defense Of Insanity In Criminal Cases, John R. Rood

Articles

The great lengths to which the defense of insanity has been carried in homicide cases has induced numerous legislative attempts to abolish the evil; and the fate which such legislation has met and deserves at the hands of the courts is a matter of considerable interest.


Confinement Of The Insane, Thomas M. Cooley Dec 1879

Confinement Of The Insane, Thomas M. Cooley

Articles

The time is almost within the memory of living persons when it was deemed not only lawful but proper to confine persons afflicted with mental disease in dungeons and with chains, and to subject them to beating, at the discretion of their keepers, in order to subdue their senseless fury and drive away their delusions.1 The notions of an ignorant and barbarous age justified such treatment, but the common law on the subject has been so much modified in the greater intelligence of the present century that opinions as to how much of the old rules remain must be expressed …