Law Commons^™

Shifting The Male Gaze Of Evidence, Teneille R. Brown

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In this article I target the altar at which many of us worship—the pursuit of rationality. For evidence purposes, rationality is defined as decisions that are reasonable, objective, inductive, and free from the bias of emotion. This view of rationality is deeply embedded in evidence scholarship and practice. It is also reflected in evidence rules like FRE 403, which treat emotional testimony as unfairly prejudicial simply because it is emotional. The anti-emotion view of rationality reflects the thinking of Western philosophical giants. Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Bacon all thought that men should strive for rationality by suppressing their emotions, because …

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about …

Nudges That Should Fail?, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Professor Sunstein (2017) discusses possible causes for and policy implications of the failure of nudges, with a special attention to defaults. Though he focuses on nudges that fail when they should succeed, Sunstein recognizes that some failures reveal that a nudge should not have been attempted to begin with. Nudges that fail, however, does not consider fully the relationship between the outcomes of nudging and their likely welfare effects, most notably neglecting the troubling case of nudges that succeed when they should fail. Hence, after clarifying the boundaries of legitimate nudging and noting the fourfold relationship between the efficacy of …

A Good Enough Reason: Addiction, Agency And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

The article begins by contrasting medical and moral views of addiction and how such views influence responsibility and policy analysis. It suggests that since addiction always involves action and action can always be morally evaluated, we must independently decide whether addicts do not meet responsibility criteria rather than begging the question and deciding by the label of ‘disease’ or ‘moral weakness’. It then turns to the criteria for criminal responsibility and shows that the criteria for criminal responsibility, like the criteria for addiction, are all folk psychological. Therefore, any scientific information about addiction must be ‘translated’ into the law’s folk …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

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 …

Preferences And Rational Choice: New Perspectives And Legal Implications: Introduction, Matthew D. Adler, Claire Finkelstein, Peter H. Huang

Publications

No abstract provided.

How Relevant Is Jury Rationality?, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide by Cass Sunstein, et al. The book provides a good example of a recent trend: the use of behavioralist research to justify surprisingly paternalistic legal reforms. While critics of behavioralism often contend that its theoretical foundations are weak, this approach is unlikely to prove an effective rejoinder in the new debate about what kinds of paternalism are made permissible by human "irrationality". A better approach: (1) notes the lack of a nexus between behavioralism and the supposed emergent necessity of paternalist reforms; and (2) suggests that juror unwillingness to apply cost-benefit formula …

Not Interaction But Melding - The "Russian Dressing" Theory Of Emotions: An Explanation Of The Phenomenology Of Emotions And Rationality With Suggested Related Maxims For Judges And Other Legal Decision Makers, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

Even after centuries of contrary philosophy and psychology, many commentators, jurisprudes, and law makers insist that emotions have no legitimate place in most legal decision making. This recalcitrance, of course, is misplaced in light of the powerful body of theory explaining that without emotions, decisions, including matters of law and policy, simply cannot be made. Judges, along with all societal actors, must disabuse themselves of the fallacious belief that emotions obstruct or obscure reason in all endeavors, particularly morality, law, and justice.

The project of truly apprehending emotions, however, requires more than appreciating that they play a crucial role in …

Near Misses, William I. Miller

Articles

I was recently invited to give a keynote address for a small academic conference whose advertised theme was "Near Misses, Contingencies, and Histories." I have a rough and ready understanding of the near miss, the same kind of understanding we have of most words and phrases that spill out effortlessly in normal conversation. I use it and have heard it used by myriad others to describe a certain style of disappointment and regret. It is a concept generally available to us all, but when coupled with contingencies and histories, as in the title of the conference with its vague suggestions …