Law Commons^™

O.J. Simpson Verdict Raises Questions About Jury System, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This opinion column examines whether conformity pressures, confirmation bias, and belief perseverance could have influenced jury deliberations and the verdict in The State of California v. O. J. Simpson.

Attitude-Behavior Correspondence? Why Susan Smith Was Spared, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This opinion column employs the Susan Smith homicide case to explore attitude-behavior correspondence. The article describes Richard LaPiere's (1934) landmark study "Attitudes vs. actions" published in the journal Social Forces and Leonard Bickman's (1972) study "Environmental attitudes and actions" published in the Journal of Social Psychology.

Dangerous Decisions: An Essay On The Mathematics Of Clinical Violence Prediction And Involuntary Hospitalization, Douglas Mossman Md

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article has two major purposes. First, it provides a mathematical
description of an ideal procedure for making clinical decisions about patients'
future violence, a description that provides a context for evaluating clinicians'
"dangerousness decisions." For purposes of illustration, the Article uses a specific clinical situation-deciding whether to hospitaize involuntarily a patient
based on his risk of harming another. The Article argues that the decision
involves balancing potential risks to third parties (often the patient's family
members) with the "massive deprivation of liberty and other potential
harms to the patient that could result from confinement. The mathematical
description of the …

Rashomon And The Criminal Law: Mental Disability And The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Michael L. Perlin, Keri K. Gould

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Upward Contempt, William I. Miller

Articles

Contempt and shame go hand in hand. Actions that should shame us, styles of self-presentation that should humiliate us if we are socially competent enough to have such a purchase on ourselves, are those actions and styles that generate and justify the contempt of others for us. Or, changing the causal order: one's contempt of us will generate shame or humiliation in us if we concur with the judgment of our contemptibility, that is, if the contempt is justified, or indignation and even vengeful fury if it is unjustified. Contempt is thus a mechanism of ranking people or of contesting …

Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The jury's competence, unlike that of the judge, rests partly on its ability to reflect the perspectives, experiences, and values of the ordinary people in the community - not just the most common or typical community perspective, but the whole range of viewpoints.

Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller

Articles

With the exception of St Augustine and perhaps Abelard, often praised as modern before their time, it is not unusual to find it maintained that the individual was not available in any serious conceptual, psychological or even sociological way before the seventeenth century. Our thick and deep self, according to this view, is thus a rather recent phenomenon. Some more expansive souls find the individual already emerging a century earlier, during the Reformation. Within the last three decades, medievalists, chagrined at being contemned by classicists on one flank and an alliance of Renaissance scholars, early modernists, modernists and post-modernists on …

Justice, Liability, And Blame: Community Views And The Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

All Faculty Scholarship

This book reports empirical studies on 18 different areas of substantive criminal law in which the study results showing ordinary people’s judgments of justice are compared to the governing legal doctrine to highlight points of agreement and disagreement. The book also identifies trends and patterns in agreement and disagreement and discusses the implications for the formulation of criminal law. The chapters include:

Chapter 1. Community Views and the Criminal Law (Introduction; An Overview; Why Community Views Should Matter; Research Methods)

Chapter 2. Doctrines of Criminalization: What Conduct Should Be Criminal? (Objective Requirements of Attempt (Study 1); Creating a Criminal Risk …

Deception, Self-Deception, And Mythology: The Law Of Salmon In The Pacific Northwest, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

Articles

This paper will present a Puritan Model of the Law of Lies, which is a prominent (but by no means only) model observable in U.S. law. We will then turn to the underpinnings in evolutionary theory of deception and self-deception. We will next apply these concepts to the worlds of salmon law and policymaking, which are marked conspicuously by evidences of deceit. Some conclusions will be offered on how deceit and self-deception are addressed in the law. We will conclude with some distinctions between the laws of deception and self-deception.

For the most part, our deceptions are governed by the …