Law Commons^™

The Choice To Limit Choice: Using Psychiatric Advance Directives To Manage The Effects Of Mental Illness And Support Self-Responsibility, Breanne M. Sheetz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Psychiatric advance directives are a valuable tool for individuals with mental illnesses. Ulysses directives, in particular, allow individuals to bind themselves to treatment in advance of needing it for the purpose of overcoming illness-induced refusals. This Note evaluates the effectiveness of state advance directive statutes in three areas that are especially important for Ulysses directives: defining competency to execute, activate, and revoke directives; waiving the constitutional right to refuse treatment; and encouraging provider compliance. This Note ultimately advocates for other states to adopt provisions similar to a Washington State statute. The Washington statute authorizes Ulysses directives by allowing advance consent …

The Origins Of Shared Intuitions Of Justice, Paul H. Robinson, Robert O. Kurzban, Owen D. Jones

All Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to the common wisdom among criminal law scholars, the empirical evidence reveals that people's intuitions of justice are often specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself – physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions – the shared intuitions are stunningly consistent, across cultures as well as demographics. It is puzzling that judgments of moral blameworthiness, which seem so complex and subjective, reflect such a remarkable consensus. What could explain this striking result? The authors theorize that one explanation may be an evolved predisposition toward …

Blinking On The Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

How do judges judge? Do they apply law to facts in a mechanical and deliberative way, as the formalists suggest they do, or do they rely on hunches and gut feelings, as the realists maintain? Debate has raged for decades, but researchers have offered little hard evidence in support of either model. Relying on empirical studies of judicial reasoning and decision making, we propose an entirely new model of judging that provides a more accurate explanation of judicial behavior. Our model accounts for the tendency of the human brain to make automatic, snap judgments, which are surprisingly accurate, but which …

It's Really About Sex: Same-Sex Marriage, Lesbigay Parenting, And The Psychology Of Disgust, Richard E. Redding

Working Paper Series

The effects of gay and lesbian parenting on children has been the touchstone issue in much of the recent state litigation on same sex marriage, with opponents of same sex marriage arguing that there is a rational basis for denying marriage rights to gays and lesbians because the central purpose of marriage is procreation and childrearing, but that children are harmed or disadvantaged when raised by gay or lesbian parents. To interrogate this claim, I critique the social science research that informs the concerns frequently expressed about the possible negative effects of lesbigay parenting on children's emotional, psychosocial, and sexual …

A Limited Defense Of Clinical Placebo Deception, Adam Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fitness For Trial In The District Court: The Legal Perspective, Darius Whelan

Darius Whelan

La Cesión De Derechos En El Código Civil Peruano, Edward Ivan Cueva

Edward Ivan Cueva

La Cesión de Derechos en el Código Civil Peruano

The Health Implications Of Violence Against Women: Untangling The Complexities Of Actual And Chronic Effects: Part Two, Carol E. Jordan

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

No abstract provided.

Concordance & Conflict In Intuitions Of Justice, Paul H. Robinson, Robert O. Kurzban

All Faculty Scholarship

The common wisdom among criminal law theorists and policy makers is that the notion of desert is vague and the subject to wide disagreement. Yet the empirical evidence in available studies, including new studies reported here, paints a dramatically different picture. While moral philosophers may disagree on some aspects of moral blameworthiness, people's intuitions of justice are commonly specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself – physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions – people's shared intuitions cut across demographics and cultures. The findings raise …

Rewarding Outside Directors, Assaf Hamdani, Reinier Kraakman

Michigan Law Review

While they often rely on the threat of penalties to produce deterrence, legal systems rarely use the promise of rewards. In this Article, we consider the use of rewards to motivate director vigilance. Measures to enhance director liability are commonly perceived to be too costly. We, however demonstrate that properly designed reward regimes could match the behavioral incentives offered by negligence-based liability regimes but with significantly lower costs. We further argue that the market itself cannot implement such a regime in the form of equity compensation for directors. We conclude by providing preliminary sketches of two alternative reward regimes. While …

Algunos Apuntes En Torno A La Prescripción Extintiva Y La Caducidad, Edward Ivan Cueva

Edward Ivan Cueva

No abstract provided.

Efforts To Improve The Illinois Capital Punishment System: Worth The Cost?, Thomas P. Sullivan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Standing Alone: Conformity, Coercion, And The Protection Of The Holdout Juror, Jason D. Reichelt

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The holdout juror in felony criminal trials is a product of the near-universal decision rule in federal and state courts of a unanimous verdict. In recent years, courts have increasingly inquired into a jury's deliberations when a holdout juror has been identified amid allegations of misconduct. This Article helps bridge the considerable gap between cognitive psychology and legal scholarship, analyzing the thought processes of the holdout juror through the application of empirical evidence and psychological modeling, to conclude that the improved protection of the holdout juror is a necessary and critical component to the preservation of a defendant's right to …

14. Filial Dependency And Recantation Of Child Sexual Abuse Allegations., Lindsay C. Malloy, Thomas D. Lyon, Jodi A. Quas

Thomas D. Lyon

The Health Implications Of Violence Against Women: Untangling The Complexities Of Acute And Chronic Effects: Part One, Carol E. Jordan

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

No abstract provided.

Deconstructing Thinking Like A Lawyer: Analyzing The Cognitive Components Of The Analytical Mind, Larry O. Natt Gantt Ii

Campbell Law Review

This article ... tackles the task of identifying the cognitive components of legal thinking. The article begins this task by discussing the development of modern law school pedagogy, which gave rise to the emphasis on thinking like a lawyer. The article then considers current conceptions of legal thinking which have divided the skill into cognitive and practical components, and it examines why the cognitive components remain at the center of the skill. The article then surveys empirical research on legal thinking by examining recent research on personality and learning styles as well as research on law student and lawyer surveys. …

The Non-Problem Of Free Will In Forensic Psychiatry And Psychology, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

This article demonstrates that there is no free will problem in forensic psychiatry by showing that free will or its lack is not a criterion for any legal doctrine and it is not an underlying general foundation for legal responsibility doctrines and practices. There is a genuine metaphysical free will problem, but the article explains why it is not relevant to forensic practice. Forensic practitioners are urged to avoid all usage of free will in their forensic thinking and work product because it is irrelevant and spawns confusion.

Heuristics And Biases In Bankruptcy Judges, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Do specialized judges make better decisions than judges who are generalists? Specialized judges surely come to know their area of law well, but specialization might also allow judges to develop better, more reliable ways of assessing cases. We assessed this question by presenting a group of specialized judges with a set of hypothetical cases designed to elicit a reliance on common heuristics that can lead judges to make poor decisions. Although the judges resisted the influence of some of these heuristics, they also expressed a clear vulnerability to others. These results suggest that specialization does not produce better judgment.

News Media’S Impact On Perceptions Of The Civil Justice System, Hugh M. Robert

ExpressO

With cases in the news like the McDonalds case, it has left the public with a very distorted view of the civil justice system. Information about the civil litigation system is critical because citizens report that the news media is their primary source of information about the court system, an even more important source than contact with the courts themselves. With the general public relying primarily on the news media as their source of information, it is necessary to examine what is being reported and the frequency of covering both sides to the story, the true story.

The Hidden Harm Of Law And Economics, Daniel I A Cohen

ExpressO

The paper deals with the adverse psychodynamic consequences to an individual and to society, immediately and in the long run, of dissolving individual responsibility for fault as in the doctrine of Law and economics.

Claim Construction, Appeal, And The Predictability Of Interpretive Regimes, Jeffrey A. Lefstin

ExpressO

Interpretation is central to patent law, because most adjudications require association of written claims with non-linguistic subject matter. By some accounts, the lack of predictability in the law of claim interpretation has reached crisis proportions, and has prompted calls for far-reaching changes in the way patent issues are adjudicated. However, the actual evidence that questions of interpretation are more problematic than other aspects of patent law is sparser than is commonly recognized. Moreover, while the controversy over claim interpretation centers around the predictability of interpretation between trial and appeal, what is important is to be able to predict outcomes before …

10. False Denials: Overcoming Methodological Biases In Abuse Disclosure Research., Thomas D. Lyon

Thomas D. Lyon

Bias, The Brain, And Student Evaluations Of Teaching, Deborah J Merritt

ExpressO

Student evaluations of teaching are a common fixture at American law schools, but they harbor surprising biases. Extensive psychology research demonstrates that these assessments respond overwhelmingly to a professor’s appearance and nonverbal behavior; ratings based on just thirty seconds of silent videotape correlate strongly with end-of-semester evaluations. The nonverbal behaviors that influence teaching evaluations are rooted in physiology, culture, and habit, allowing characteristics like race and gender to affect evaluations. The current process of gathering evaluations, moreover, allows social stereotypes to filter students’ perceptions, increasing risks of bias. These distortions are inevitable products of the intuitive, “system one” cognitive processes …

The In-Between Places Where Children Are Socialized, Anne Dailey

Faculty Articles and Papers

In Between Home and School, Professor Rosenbury makes a splendid contribution to the emerging legal scholarship on the influence of cultural contexts on children's socialization. Scholars in this field have begun to study the effects on children of the media, peer relationships, civic institutions, and early caregiving environments. Professor Rosenbury's is a bold new voice in this genre offering a normative paradigm of space to replace the traditional dyadic model of state-parent authority over children. At the heart of the spatial paradigm is the view that in-between spaces socialize children in ways that differ both procedurally and substantively from the …

Gender Matters: Making The Case For Trans Inclusion, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

The transgender communities are producing an important and nuanced critique of our gender system. For community members, the project is self-constitutive and, therefore, has an immediacy that also marks the efforts of other marginalized groups who have attempted to make sense of the world through description, interrogation, and, ultimately, a program for transformation. The transgender project also has universalizing elements because, existing within the gender system, each one of us embodies a particular gender articulation. It is through this articulation that we define ourselves in relation to the gender we were assigned at birth, the gender we choose, the gender …

Calling For Stories, Nancy Levit, Allen Rostron

Nancy Levit

Storytelling is a fundamental part of legal practice, teaching, and thought. Telling stories as a method of practicing law reaches back to the days of the classical Greek orators. Before legal education became an academic matter, the apprenticeship system for training lawyers consisted of mentoring and telling war stories. As the law and literature movement evolved, it sorted itself into three strands: law in literature, law as literature, and storytelling. The storytelling branch blossomed.

Over the last few decades, storytelling became a subject of enormous interest and controversy within the world of legal scholarship. Law review articles appeared in the …

Development And Confirmatory Factor Analysis Of The Community Norms Of Child Neglect Scale, Rebecca Goodvin, David R. Johnson, Sam A. Hardy, Michelle Graef, Jeff M. Chambers

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

This article describes the development of the Community Norms of Child Neglect Scale (CNCNS), a new measure of perceptions of child neglect, for use in community samples. The CNCNS differentiates among four subtypes of neglect (failure to provide for basic needs, lack of supervision, emotional neglect, and educational neglect). Scenarios ranging in seriousness for each subtype were presented to a large community sample (N = 3,809). Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that a four-factor model provided a better fit to the data than did a model specifying only one overall neglect factor, suggesting this sample distinguished among the four subtypes of …

The Uneasy Entente Between Legal Insanity And Mens Rea: Beyond Clark V. Arizona, Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

There is uneasy tension in the criminal law between the doctrines of mens rea and the defense of legal insanity. Last term, the Supreme Court addressed both these issues, but failed to clarify the relation between them. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, this article discusses the broad doctrinal, theoretical, and normative issues concerning responsibility that arise in this context. We clarify the meaning of mental disorder, mens rea and legal insanity, the justification for and the relation between the latter two, and the relation among all three. Next we consider the reasoning in Clark, and for the most …

Interviewing Suspected Victims Of Child Maltreatment, Bette L. Bottoms, A R. Perona, E Sorenson, Cynthia J. Najdowski

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Andrea Yates Case: Insanity On Trial, Phillip J. Resnick

Cleveland State Law Review

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned each of her five children in her bathtub. The nation struggled to understand how a loving mother could systematically kill her children in apparent cold blood. No crime evokes more intense feelings than a mother killing her own children. There was extraordinary media coverage of her trial in Houston, Texas in 2002. Her defense attorneys, George Parnham and Wendell Odom entered a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) to multiple counts of first degree murder with death penalty specifications. The 2002 trial jury verdict of guilty was overturned on appeal. …