Law Commons^™

Tragedies Of The Cultural Commons, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

In the United States, Black cultural expressions of democratic life that operate within specific historical-local contexts, yet reflect a shared set of sociocultural mores, have been historically crowded out of the law and policymaking process. Instead of democratic cultural discourse occurring within an open and neutral marketplace of ideas, the discursive production and consumption of democratic culture in American politics has been rivalrous. Such rivalry too often enables dominant White supremacist cultural beliefs, values, and practices to exercise their hegemony upon law’s production and meaning. The result has been tragedy for politically disempowered and socioeconomically excluded communities.

This Article uses …

Demystifying Mindreading For The Law, Teneille R. Brown

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

To lawyers, mindreading conjures up flamboyant images of crystal balls or charlatans. However, it is a deeply serious endeavor for the law. The primary role of fact-finders in civil, criminal, and administrative trials in the United States is to serve as highly-regulated mind readers—to listen to the testimony and decide whether the witnesses are credible and telling the truth. Because it can be so easily biased, we must directly acknowledge how jurors and judges (in addition to voters and employers) automatically and imperfectly read minds. We must remove the “mystique of mindreading,” and see how ordinary assessments of mental states …