Law Commons^™

Primer On Risk Assessment For Legal Decision-Makers, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This primer is addressed to judges, parole board members, and other legal decisionmakers who use or are considering using the results of risk assessment instruments (RAIs) in making determinations about post-conviction dispositions, as well as to legislators and executive officials responsible for authorizing such use. It is meant to help these decisionmakers determine whether a particular RAI is an appropriate basis for legal determinations and whether evaluators who rely on an RAI have done so properly. This primer does not take a position on whether RAIs should be integrated into the criminal process. Rather, it provides legal decision-makers with information …

The Case For A Federal Criminal Court System (And Sentencing Reform), Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In their article in this issue, Professors Peter Menell and Ryan Vacca describe a federal court docket that is overloaded and unable to process cases efficiently. As they depict it, justice in the federal courts is either delayed or denied, disparity in legal outcomes among circuits is increasing, and the Supreme Court is falling farther and farther behind in resolving circuit splits. While these problems have been around for a while, Menell and Vacca argue they are getting worse and will only continue to worsen if radical action is not taken. Their article provides enough of a factual record to …

Detecting Mens Rea In The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Gideon Yaffe

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

What if the widely used Model Penal Code (MPC) assumes a distinction between mental states that doesn’t actually exist? The MPC assumes, for instance, that there is a real distinction in real people between the mental states it defines as “knowing” and “reckless.” But is there?

If there are such psychological differences, there must also be brain differences. Consequently, the moral legitimacy of the Model Penal Code’s taxonomy of culpable mental states – which punishes those in defined mental states differently – depends on whether those mental states actually correspond to different brain states in the way the MPC categorization …