Law Commons^™

Alternative Facts And The Post-Truth Society: Meeting The Challenge, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

In the hours following the 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration, the world was introduced to the concept of "alternative facts," a term that quickly became synonymous with a willingness to persevere with a particular belief either in complete ignorance of, or with a total disregard for, reality.' The increasing incidence of alternative facts in the popular and political arena creates a critical conundrum for lawyers, judges, legislators, and anyone interested in deliberative democracy, since it is unclear how rational debate can proceed if empirical evidence holds no persuasive value.

This Essay seeks to use empirical research to demonstrate that conventional means …

Why Bias Challenges To Administrative Adjudication Should Succeed, Kent Barnett

Missouri Law Review

Administrative adjudication’s partiality problem is a worthy candidate to join these claims for three reasons. First, prohibiting administrative adjudicators’ partiality, unlike some other structural areas, does not require overruling prior decisions and relies heavily on the Court’s recent precedent. Second, partiality challenges fit comfortably within the Court’s penchant for formalism and prophylaxes in structural constitutional matters. Indeed, formalism is much more justified for partiality challenges than certain other structural issues and has a longer jurisprudential provenance. Finally, as compared to other proposed challenges to the administrative state, challenges based on administrative partiality are more likely to earn enough votes to …

Judicial Bias: The Ongoing Challenge, Kathleen Mahoney

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This article calls for a renewed commitment to judicial education on the roles that gender, race, class and other biases can have on judicial decisions and impartiality. This article also calls for the appointment of a more representative and diverse judiciary. An explosion of activity occurred for about a decade between the late 1980s until the late 1990s to promote and implement social context education for judges to help judges understand the realities of people most unlike themselves, and to appoint judges to be more representative of the population of Canada. But this trend has diminished to the point that …

Federalism, Diversity, Equality, And Article Iii Judges: Geography, Identity, And Bias , Sharon E. Rush

Missouri Law Review

Each individual has a background, and that background shapes the individual's views about life, creating an inevitable form of bias referred to as "experiential bias." Experiential bias is shaped by many identity traits, including, among others, race, sex, sexual orientation, religion and even geography. The geographic identity of state judges and their potential unfair experiential bias is the common justification for federal court diversity jurisdiction. But experiential bias is inescapable, affecting everyone who's ever had an experience, and is generally not unfair, as demonstrated by most studies regarding the "fairness" justification for diversity jurisdiction. More recently, Justice O'Connor connected racial …

Disqualification For Bias And International Tribunals: Room For A Common Test , Margaret Allars

Missouri Law Review

This Article explores the scope for the development of a bias test applying to international tribunals. In the absence of a developed test in any such tribunal, an obvious source of jurisprudence is the case-law on Article 6(1) of the European Convention, which the European Court of Human Rights applies to domestic tribunals of member states. The requirement of impartiality in Article 6(1) has remained an abstract concept, slowly evolving on the foundation of common law maxims accepted as its rationale. While United Kingdom courts claim that their recent renovation of the common law test of apparent bias is the …

Recipe For Bias: An Empirical Look At The Interplay Between Institutional Incentives And Bounded Rationality In Prosecutorial Decision Making, A, Barbara O'Brien

Missouri Law Review

Prosecutors wield tremendous power, which is kept in check by a set of unique ethical obligations. In explaining why prosecutors sometimes fail to honor these multiple and arguably divergent obligations, scholars tend to fall into two schools of thought. The first schoolfocuses upon institutional incentives that promote abuses ofpower. These scholars implicitly treat the prosecutor as a rational actor who decides whether to comply with a rule based on an assessment of the expected costs and benefits of doing so. The second school focuses upon bounded human rationality, drawing on the teachings of cognitive science to argue that prosecutors transgress …

Race Matters In Bankruptcy Reform, A. Mechele Dickerson

Missouri Law Review

On April 20, 2005, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of ("BAPCPA") was signed into law and became fully effective for cases filed on or after October 17, 2005. 4 After considering bankruptcy reform for almost a decade, Congress ultimately concluded that some debtors were abusing bankruptcy laws by, among other things, discharging debts they had the means to pay. To curb this perceived abuse, Congress decided to radically overhaul the consumer provisions of the Code by generally making it harder for an opportunistic or "Abusive Debtor" to discharge his debts. Given the sweeping nature of these changes, …

Patterns Of Bias In Mediation, Christopher Honeyman

Journal of Dispute Resolution

The last few years' discussion of mediation is imbued with a certain "born again" quality. The enthusiasm is understandable in view of the attractive features of this process; but it has obscured the facts that no process works well for everyone, and that for some people, mediation is worse than useless. In view of the general tide of professional opinion that mediation is a "better" process for resolving disputes, qualifications and reservations are easily enough overlooked, and "better for whom?" is not a particularly popular question