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Full-Text Articles in Law
An Economic Analysis Of Fact Witness Payment, Eugene Kontorovich, Ezra Friedman
An Economic Analysis Of Fact Witness Payment, Eugene Kontorovich, Ezra Friedman
Faculty Working Papers
In this paper we discuss the disparate treatment of perceptual (''fact'') witnesses and expert witnesses in the legal system. We highlight the distinction between the perceptual act of witnessing and the act of testifying, and argue that although there might be good reasons to regulate payments to fact witnesses, the customary prohibition on paying them for their services is not justified by reference to economic theory. We propose considering a court mediated system for compensating fact witnesses so as to encourage witnessing of legally important events.We construct a simple model of witness incentives, and simulate the effects of several possible …
Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell
Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell
Faculty Working Papers
Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor's intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm's foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to …
If The Shoe Fits They Might Acquit: The Value Of Forensic Science Testimony, Jonathan Koehler
If The Shoe Fits They Might Acquit: The Value Of Forensic Science Testimony, Jonathan Koehler
Faculty Working Papers
The probative value of forensic science evidence (such as a shoeprint) varies widely depending on how the evidence and hypothesis of interest is characterized. This paper uses a likelihood ratio (LR) approach to identify the probative value of forensic science evidence. It argues that the "evidence" component should be characterized as a "reported match," and that the hypothesis component should be characterized as "the matching person or object is the source of the crime scene sample." This characterization of the LR forces examiners to incorporate risks from sample mix-ups and examiner error into their match statistics. But how will legal …
Hearings, Mark Spottswood
Hearings, Mark Spottswood
Faculty Working Papers
This article explores a constantly recurring procedural question: When is fact-finding improved by a live hearing, and when would it be better to rely on a written record? Unfortunately, when judges, lawyers, and rulemakers consider this issue, they are led astray by the widely shared—but false—assumption that a judge can best determine issues of credibility by viewing the demeanor of witnesses while they are testifying. In fact, a large body of scientific evidence indicates that judges are more likely to be deceived by lying or mistaken witnesses when observing their testimony in person than if the judges were to review …
The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns
The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns
Faculty Working Papers
This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social signficance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.