Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Tools Of Our Trade, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library

During the past 30 years, computers and other digital tools have evolved from scientific curiosities that promised to make our lives easy and paperless and threatened to make libraries go away to ubiquitous means of communication, research, entertainment, news, and much, much more. Access to technology for librarians today is as critical as having access to leather-bound books once was for the earliest librarians. In order to communicate with peers, patrons, and colleagues and to conduct legal research and create scholarship, today we need a device that lets us “see” the communication or information. This article explores the changing role …

Jurors’ Subjective Certainty And Standards Of Proof: The Role Of Emotion And Severity Of Charge In Subjective Probability Judgment, Yimoon Choi

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Recent empirical research suggests that jurors struggle to understand and correctly apply the standard of proof. Many researchers have focused on methods to re-write jury instructions so that standards of proof are clearer and easier for jurors to understand. This dissertation suggests the fundamental cause of jurors’ confusion concerning standards of proof is that jurors may use different decision processes (intuitive decision processing or systematic decision processing) and decision indices (objective probabilistic judgment or subjective confidence) depending upon their transient emotions or the seriousness of charge.

Study 1 assessed whether experiencing particular emotions (sadness or anger) could change mock jurors’ …

Much Ado About Authentication, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library

Much can be said about how libraries are adapting and new ways that we can continue to adapt to the rise in importance of digital resources and services. But there is a unique challenge that law libraries face that this article will attempt to address: the problem of authenticating digital legal materials. This necessity of authenticating legal materials has been articulated many times. However, there may actually be no need for authentication at all.

The question of authentication is a very important one to answer because law libraries have the responsibility of providing accurate versions of primary legal materials. It …

Cutting The Bread, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

Why the draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Received Force against Outer Space Objects (PPWT) will not work—whereas the Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities may.