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Understanding Validity In Empirical Legal Research: The Case For Methodological Pluralism In Assessing The Impact Of Science In Court, Teneille R. Brown, James Tabery, Lisa G. Aspinwall
Understanding Validity In Empirical Legal Research: The Case For Methodological Pluralism In Assessing The Impact Of Science In Court, Teneille R. Brown, James Tabery, Lisa G. Aspinwall
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
What makes a study valid or invalid? In 2013, the Hastings Law Journal published a law review article by law professor Deborah Denno entitled What Real-World Cases Tell Us About Genetic Evidence. This article questioned the validity of an article that we published in Science: The Double Edged-Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges’ Sentencing of Psychopaths? Denno’s trenchant critique focused on our use of experimental, rather than archival, methodology, and revealed a misunderstanding of the diverse goals of empirical legal research. One study, which in our case investigated the impact of biological explanations of criminal behavior on sentencing, is …