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Full-Text Articles in Law
Predicting Variation In Endowment Effect Magnitudes, Owen D. Jones, C. Jaeger, S. Brosnan, D. Levin
Predicting Variation In Endowment Effect Magnitudes, Owen D. Jones, C. Jaeger, S. Brosnan, D. Levin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Hundreds of studies demonstrate human cognitive biases that are both inconsistent with “rational” decisionmaking and puzzlingly patterned. One such bias, the “endowment effect” (also known as “reluctance to trade”), occurs when people instantly value an item they have just acquired at a much higher price than the maximum they would have paid to acquire it. This bias impedes a vast range of real-world transactions, making it important to understand. Prior studies have documented items that do or do not generate endowment effects, and have noted that the effects vary in magnitude. But none has predicted any of the substantial between-item …
Detecting Mens Rea In The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Gideon Yaffe
Detecting Mens Rea In The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Gideon Yaffe
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
What if the widely used Model Penal Code (MPC) assumes a distinction between mental states that doesn’t actually exist? The MPC assumes, for instance, that there is a real distinction in real people between the mental states it defines as “knowing” and “reckless.” But is there?
If there are such psychological differences, there must also be brain differences. Consequently, the moral legitimacy of the Model Penal Code’s taxonomy of culpable mental states – which punishes those in defined mental states differently – depends on whether those mental states actually correspond to different brain states in the way the MPC categorization …
Science And The Eighth Amendment, Meghan J. Ryan
Science And The Eighth Amendment, Meghan J. Ryan
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
As time hurtles forward, new science constantly emerges, and many scientific fields can shed light on whether a punishment is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, or even on whether bail or fines are unconstitutionally excessive under the Eighth Amendment. In fact, in recent years, science has played an increasingly important role in the Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. From the development of an offender’s brain, to the composition of lethal injection drugs, even to measurements of pain, knowledge of various scientific fields is becoming central to understanding whether a punishment is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. There are a number of limits to …