Legal Profession Commons^™

Minding The Court: Enhancing The Decision-Making Process, Pamela Casey, Kevin Burke, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

A compelling and growing body of research from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience provides important insights about how we process information and make decisions. This research has great potential significance for judges, who spend much of their time making decisions of great importance to others. For most judges, this research literature is not part of their judicial education. This article reviews cutting edge research about decision making and discusses its implications for helping judges and those who work with them produce fair processes and just outcomes. It builds on a 2007 American Judges Association paper that encouraged judges …

Ripples Against The Other Shore: The Impact Of Trauma Exposure On The Immigration Process Through Adjudicators, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Behavioral Legal Ethics, Jean R. Sternlight, Jennifer K. Robbennolt

Scholarly Works

Complaints about lawyers’ ethics are commonplace. While it is surely the case that some attorneys deliberately choose to engage in misconduct, psychological research suggests a more complex story. It is not only “bad apples” who are unethical. Instead, ethical lapses can occur more easily and less intentionally than we might imagine. In this paper, we examine the ethical “blind spots,” slippery slopes, and “ethical fading” that may lead good people to behave badly. We then explore specific aspects of legal practice that can present particularly difficult challenges for lawyers given the nature of behavioral ethics - complex and ambiguous ethical …

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Building Resilience In Foster Children: The Role Of The Child's Advocate, Frank E. Vandervort, James Henry, Mark A. Sloane

Articles

This Article provides an introduction to, and brief overview of trauma, its impact upon foster children, and steps children's advocates" can take to lessen or ameliorate the impact of trauma upon their clients. This Article begins in Part 11 by defining relevant terms. Part III addresses the prevalence of trauma among children entering the child welfare system. Part IV considers the neurodevelopmental (i.e., the developing brain) impact of trauma on children and will explore how that trauma may manifest emotionally and behaviorally. With this foundation in place, Part V discusses the need for a comprehensive trauma assessment including a thorough …

Child Welfare Cases Involving Mental Illness: Reflections On The Role And Responsibilities Of The Lawyer-Guardian Ad Litem, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Child welfare cases involving mental illness suffered either by a child or his parent can be among the most difficult and perplexing that a child’s lawyerguardian ad litem (L-GAL) will handle. They may present daunting problems of accessing necessary and appropriate services as well as questions about whether and when such mental health problems can be resolved or how best to manage them. They also require the L-GAL to carefully consider crucially important questions—rarely with all the information one would like to have and too often with information that comes late in the case, is fragmented or glaringly incomplete. This …

Happiness In Business Or Law, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This article provides a short introduction to recent happiness research and its applications to business or law that is organized as follows. Section I briefly considers: (1) troubling and not so troubling reservations about happiness research, and (2) how money and happiness are related. Section II concisely surveys two sets of applications of happiness research to business, namely: (1) workplace well-being and meaning, and (2) marketing. Section III succinctly reviews two categories of happiness research implications for law: (1) business regulation, and (2) law student and lawyer happiness.

Legal Reasoning And Scientific Reasoning, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

In my presentation for the 2010 Meador Lectures on Rationality, I chose to compare legal reasoning and scientific reasoning. Both law and science pride themselves on the rationality of their intellectual methods and believe that those methods are designed to analyze questions and reach the correct conclusions by means of reason, free from cognitive or emotional biases. Of course, both law and science often fall short of this ideal at all levels, from the decisions about individual legal cases or scientific studies to the acceptance of general theories. In many ways, the biases that mislead legal and scientific thinkers are …

Using Mindfulness Practice To Work With Emotions, Deborah Calloway

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Mental Disorders And The "System Of Judgmental Responsibility", Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Authentic Happiness & Meaning At Law Firms, Peter H. Huang, Rick Swedloff

Publications

We advocate that law firms can and should foster authentic happiness and meaning in the professional lives of their associates. Based upon empirical and experimental research in behavioral economics and positive psychology, we consider how law firms can implement policies to promote authentic happiness and meaning in their associates' professional lives. We also believe that law schools can and should help to reduce the anxiety, stress, and unhappiness that individuals feel as law students and help them develop abilities to achieve meaningful careers as law firm associates. We provide a guide as to how law firms and law schools can …

Baby, Look Inside Your Mirror: The Legal Profession's Willful And Sanist Blindness To Lawyers With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The legal profession has notoriously ignored the reality that a significant number of its members exhibit signs of serious mental illness (and become addicted or habituated to drugs or alcohol at levels that are statistically significantly elevated from levels of the public at large). This is no longer news. What has not been explored is why so much of the bar has remained willfully ignorant of these realities, and why it refuses to confront the depths of this problem.

The roots of this puzzle are found in the social attitude of sanism, an irrational prejudice of the same quality and …

Legal Scholarship, Humility, And The Scientific Method, David J. Herring

Articles

This essay responds to the question of What next for law and behavioral biology? by describing an approach to legal scholarship that relies on the scientific method. There are two steps involved in this approach to legal scholarship. First, the legal scholar must become familiar with an area of scientific research that is relevant to the development of law and policy. (This essay uses behavioral biology research as an example.) Second, the legal scholar must seek and form relationships across disciplines, becoming an active member of a scientific research team that conducts studies relevant to particular issues of law and …

How To Cross-Train For Peak Lawyering, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …

A Law Of Healing, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Psychological Type Theory In The Legal Profession, Raymond B. Marcin

Scholarly Articles

For some time now the phenomenon known as psychological typing has been finding its way into the study and even the practice of law. The phenomenon has its origin in the notion that people are different in ways that are meaningfully categorizable and classifiable, i.e., that there are genuine, empirically verifiable psychological "types" among people, with the members of each type possessing similar psychological characteristics to some significant extent. The phenomenon is based in Jungian psychology, but its influence has extended well beyond that discipline and into others, including the law and lawyering. More than two decades ago, in an …

Fatal Assumption: A Critical Evaluation Of The Role Of Counsel In Mental Disability Cases, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

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 …

Invisible Teachers: A Comment On Perceptions In The Classroom, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Invisible Teachers: A Comment On Perceptions In The Classroom, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.