Law and Psychology Commons^™

The Predictors Of Juvenile Recidivism: Testimonies Of Adult Students 18 Years And Older Exiting From Alternative Education, La Toshia Palmer

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to identify and describe the importance of the predictors of juvenile recidivism and the effectiveness of efforts to prevent/avoid juvenile recidivism as perceived by previously detained, arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education in Northern California. A second purpose was to explore the types of support provided by alternative schools and the perceived importance of the support to avoid recidivism according to adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education.

Methodology: This qualitative, descriptive research design identified …

Panel Discussion: Ethnographic Evidence

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Implicit Racial Biases In Prosecutorial Summations: Proposing An Integrated Response, Praatika Prasad

Fordham Law Review

Racial bias has evolved from the explicit racism of the Jim Crow era to amore subtle and difficult-to-detect form: implicit racial bias. Implicit racial biases exist unconsciously and include negative racial stereotypes andassociations. Everyone, including actors in the criminal justice system who believe themselves to be fair, possess these biases. Although inaccessible through introspection, implicit biases can easily be triggered through language. When trials involve Black defendants, prosecutors’ summations increasingly include racial themes that could trigger jurors’ implicit biases, lead to the perpetuation of unfair stereotypes, and contribute to racial injustice and disparate outcomes. This Note examines and critiques the …

'Your Old Road Is/Rapidly Agin': International Human Rights Standards And Their Impact On Forensic Psychologists, The Practice Of Forensic Psychology, And The Conditions Of Institutionalization Of Persons With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Lynn Stuart Weiss lecture at the American Psychological Association yearly conference, sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Psychology Foundation, August 2016, Denver, Colorado.

For years, considerations of the relationship between international human rights standards and the work of forensic psychologists have focused on the role of organized psychology in prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghirab. That issue has been widely discussed and debated, and these discussions show no sign of abating. But there has been virtually no attention given to another issue of international human …

Celebrating Mundane Conflict, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This Article interrogates the dominant conception of conflict and challenges the narrative of conflict as hard, difficult and painful to engage. The Article reveals two primary framing errors that cause one to misperceive how ubiquitous and ordinary is conflict. The first error is to misperceive conflict as categorical — something either is a conflict or it is not. People make that error as a way of trying to avoid conflict. People falsely hope that there might be a category of “not conflict,” like disagreements, that will be easier to navigate. The second error is to misperceive the world and individuals …

Honey, You're No June Cleaver: The Power Of "Dropping Pop" To Persuade, Victoria S. Salzmann

Maine Law Review

Imagine a contentious child-custody hearing in which the husband is testifying about his wife's behavior. If he were to state “she is no June Cleaver,” that testimony would have an immediate impact upon those present. Most people would understand that the husband was making a reference to Mrs. Ward Cleaver, the pearl-clad mother figure from the popular 1950s television show Leave It to Beaver. However, the reference does more than simply call to mind 1950s television. It is a vivid popular-culture allusion that immediately taps into the psyche of anyone familiar with the show. It tells the listener that the …

Reforming Recusal Rules: Reassessing The Presumption Of Judicial Impartiality In Light Of The Realities Of Judging And Changing The Substance Of Disqualification Standards To Eliminate Cognitive Errors, Melinda A. Marbes

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In recent years, high profile disqualification disputes have caught the attention of the public. In each instance there has been an outcry when a presiding jurist was asked to recuse but declined. Unfortunately, even if the jurist explains his refusal to recuse, the reasons given often are unsatisfying and do little to quell suspicions of bias. Instead, litigants, the press, and the public question whether the jurist actually is unbiased and doubt the impartiality of the judiciary as a whole. This negative reaction to refusals to recuse is caused, at least in part, by politically charged circumstances that cause further …

Inextricably Bound: Strip Clubs, Prostitution, And Sex Trafficking, Dan O'Bryant

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Moral Disengagement In Legal Judgments, Tess M. S. Neal, Robert J. Cramer

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally-relevant judgment in this theoretically-driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social-cognitive phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic psychologists' willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral disengagement would function as mediator of participants' existing attitudes and their judgmentsa theoretical bridge between attitudes and judgmentswas …

Can Practicing Mindfulness Improve Lawyer Decision-Making, Ethics, And Leadership?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, defines mindfulness as paying attention in a curious, deliberate, kind, and non-judgmental way to life as it unfolds each moment. Psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as a flexible state of mind actively engaging in the present, noticing new things, and being sensitive to context. Langer differentiates mindfulness from mindlessness, which she defines as acting based upon past behavior instead of the present and being stuck in a fixed, solitary perspective, oblivious to alternative multiple viewpoints. Something called mindfulness is currently very fashionable and has been so for some time now in American …

Moral Courage In Indigent Defense, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I take a different perspective, one that focuses on why people are able to act ethically despite pressures to do otherwise. Social science has convincingly demonstrated that the power of the situation can exert significant influence over individual behavior, thus undermining the claim that only “bad” people engage in unethical conduct.⁴ Yet, we know that there are individual differences to how people respond to ethical dilemmas, which raises a core question: why do some individuals act more ethically than others, even in similar situations?

To explore this question, I focus on a familiar domain from my …

Prostitution Policy: Legalization, Decriminalization And The Nordic Model, Ane Mathieson, Easton Branam, Anya Noble

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Don’T Risk It; Wait Until She’S Sober, Patrick John White

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Let’S Talk About Sex: A Call For Guardianship Reform In Washington State, Sage Graves

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Living Under The Boot: Militarization And Peaceful Protest, Charlotte Guerra

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Let’S Invest In People, Not Prisons: How Washington State Should Address Its Ex-Offender Unemployment Rate, Sara Taboada

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

His Feminist Facade: The Neoliberal Co-Option Of The Feminist Movement, Anjilee Dodge, Myani Gilbert

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

In Her Words: Recognizing And Preventing Abusive Litigation Against Domestic Violence Survivors, David Ward

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Persistence And Resistance: Women’S Leadership And Ending Gender-Based Violence In Guatemala, Serena Cosgrove, Kristi Lee

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Insights From Psychology: Teaching Behavioral Legal Ethics As A Core Element Of Professional Responsibility, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

The field of behavioral legal ethics—which draws on a large body of empirical research to explore how subtle and often unconscious psychological factors influence ethical decision-making by lawyers—has gained significant attention recently, including by many scholars who have called for a pedagogy that incorporates behavioral lessons into the professional responsibility curriculum. This Article provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of how law teachers can meet this challenge. Based on an approach that employs a variety of experiential techniques to immerse students in the contextual and emotional aspects of legal practice, it provides a detailed model of how to teach …

Said I, But You Have No Choice: Why A Lawyer Must Ethically Honor A Client's Decision About Mental Health Treatment Even If It Is Not What S/He Would Have Chosen, Michael L. Perlin, Naomi Weinstein

Articles & Chapters

This paper addresses a remarkably under-considered topic: the ethical standards for lawyers representing persons with mental disabilities. Although there is an extensive body of literature endorsing “zealous advocacy” as the standard for the criminal defense lawyer in “ordinary” cases, there is virtually no literature (or case law) on this question in this context.

Our thesis is simple. We reject the model of “paternalism/best interests” that is regularly substituted for a traditional legal advocacy position, and a substitution that is rarely questioned. We believe this presumption flies in the face of statutory law, constitutional law, and international human rights law, and …

Meta-Mindfulness: A New Hope, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This Essay starts by tracing its humble origins to an earlier, related and unique law review article, namely, Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs of an Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education and Parenting. This Essay describes various professional responses to Tiger Cub Strikes Back, provides an update of some developments in research about parenting and legal education since Tiger Cub Strikes Back, and recounts a few personal stories about mindfulness and related to being an ex-child prodigy. This Essay then analyzes meta-mindfulness, defined as mindfulness about mindfulness. This Essay discusses how mindfulness about mindfulness can help facilitate the …

Love, Anger, And Lawyering, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This essay explores how mindfulness practices helped one lawyer, now legal scholar, explore the roles of love and anger in lawyering.

Dangerous Diagnoses, Risky Assumptions, And The Failed Experiment Of "Sexually Violent Predator" Commitment, Deirdre M. Smith

Faculty Publications

In its 1997 opinion, Kansas v. Hendricks, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that reflected a new model of civil commitment. The targets of this new commitment law were dubbed “Sexually Violent Predators” (SVPs), and the Court upheld indefinite detention of these individuals on the assumption that there is a psychiatrically distinct class of individuals who, unlike typical recidivists, have a mental condition that impairs their ability to refrain from violent sexual behavior. And, more specifically, the Court assumed that the justice system could reliably identify the true “predators,” those for whom this unusual and extraordinary deprivation of liberty …

Behavioral Legal Ethics, Decision Making, And The New Attorney's Unique Professional Perspective, Catherine Gage O'Grady

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mindful Ethics And The Cultivation Of Concentration, Scott L. Rogers, Jan L. Jacobowitz

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Drink Like A Lawyer: The Neuroscience Of Substance Use And Its Impact On Cognitive Wellness, Debra S. Austin

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Lawyers who behave unethically and unprofessionally do so for various reasons, ranging from intention to carelessness. Lawyer misconduct can also result from decision-making flaws. Psychologist Chip Heath and his brother Dan Heath, in their best-selling book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, suggest a process to improve people’s decision-making. They introduce the acronym WRAP as the mnemonic for these decision-making heuristics: (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality-test your assumptions, (3) Attain distance before deciding, and (4) Prepare to be wrong. The WRAP process mitigates these cognitive biases: (1) narrow framing of a decision problem, (2) …

The Client Who Did Too Much, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

Using Hitchcock's MacGuffin as a theme, I discuss the dynamics between client and lawyer when the client so obsesses over the issue driving him that he persuades (or attempts to persuade) the lawyer to do things that are inadvisable from the lawyer's point of view.

Rethinking The Character And Fitness Inquiry, Leslie Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

The bar’s character and fitness inquiry seeks to protect the public. As part of this inquiry, bar applicants are required to produce detailed information about their past histories. The rationale for this inquiry is that this information can be used to identify who will subsequently become a problematic lawyer. Bar applicants bear the burden of providing their “good” character even though there is little evidence that past conduct predicts who will become a problematic lawyer. This article looks at psychological and other research that attempt to identify factors that might predict future misconduct in the work place. It also reports …