Law and Psychology Commons^™

Why Corporate Boards Should Include Lgbtq+ People, Jeremy Mcclane, Darren Rosenblum

Seattle University Law Review

Corporate boardrooms sit at the heart of most of society’s most consequential decisions but fall far short of the diversity of our society. The current movement toward board diversification aims to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups on corporate boards. More recently, some efforts have included LGBTQ+ people, even though the basis for their inclusion on corporate boards remains largely unstated. This Article examines both the normative and instrumental bases for LGBTQ+ inclusion in board diversity initiatives, articulating unspoken assumptions and linking LGBTQ+ people to the broader inclusion effort. In so doing, it begins to surface the unique issues LGBTQ+ …

Get Your Head In The Game: Gamifying The Bar Examination, Donald E. Campbell

MC Law Review

During a recent administration of the bar examination, I observed the following: a student who had a child ten days before the exam passed; a student on law review failed; a student whose predictors indicated he should fail the bar exam passed; two students who were in the library every day studying failed. Even though these folks were all taking the same exam, their outcomes varied dramatically, and there did not seem to be a common variable that predicted whether they would pass or fail. My first inclination was to throw up my hands in frustration and chalk it up …

Wandering Into Psychology And Law, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Some people have a passion for a single topic that motivates and engages them for life. I’m not one of them. I can get interested in almost anything, and my career looks more like a random walk through a candy store than a single-minded pursuit of a goal. I am both a theorist and researcher in the field of emotion and a contributor to the application of psychology to legal issues. In this piece I will focus on my work in psychology and law. A review of my research on emotion can be found in Ellsworth and Scherer (2003).

Law School News: 'A Very Clear Mission' 08-18-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty In Legal Language, Eric H. Martinez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson

Faculty Scholarship

Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features–including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization–relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings (a) undermine …

Lawyers As Caregivers, Paula Schaefer

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This Article argues that clients—much like patients in a healthcare setting—need their lawyers to be caregivers. The Article opens by developing a definition of caregiving in medicine and law. It then turns to five key components of caregiving in medicine, explaining the substantial research that this care is crucial for patient satisfaction, trust, and healing. Medical educators have drawn on this research to better prepare medical professionals to be excellent caregivers. The Article then explores the evidence that an attorney’s clients have the same needs and suffer similar harm when attorneys fail to meet these needs. Next, the Article turns …

Happily Ever After, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

I have been lucky in my upbringing and education, and especially in having advisors who let me do what I wanted to even when they didn’t think it was a good idea. This allowed me to have a deeply rewarding career devoted to two entirely different topics – basic theory and research on emotion, and applied theory and research in psychology and law. My career spanned the period from when women were considered unsuitable for scientific or academic work through the rise of feminism, so although I faced obstacles, the culture was changing quickly enough that my unusual choices soon …

How To Train Your Supervisor, Kris Franklin, Paula J. Manning

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federally Mandated Online Sales Tax: A Logistical Solution For The Future Of E-Commerce, Daniel O'Connor

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Economic Structural Transformation And Litigation: Evidence From Chinese Provinces, To Economic Change And Restructuring, Doug Bujakowski, Joan Schmit

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The "Business Interruption" Insurance Coverage Conundrum: Covid-19 Presents A Challenge, Paul E. Traynor

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Misalighned Incentives In Markets: Envisioning Finance That Benefits All Of Society, Dr. Ryan Clements

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Monsanto: Creator Of Cancer Liability

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Corporate Response To Controversial Presidential Statements Or Policies

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Lawyering 'Twisties': Naming And Untangling Performance Anxiety, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Moving Toward A Competency Based Model For Fostering Law Students’ Relational Skills, Susan L. Brooks, Marjorie A. Silver, Sarah Fishel, Kellie Wiltsie

Scholarly Works

Legal education has long been criticized for failing to provide adequate professional training to prepare graduates for legal practice realities. Many sources have lamented the lack of sufficient attention to the range of competencies necessary for law graduates to be effective practitioners and develop a positive professional identity, including those that are intra-personal, such as self-awareness, critical self-reflection, and self-directedness; those that are interpersonal, such as deep and reflective listening, empathy, compassion, cross-cultural communication, and dialogue; and those that engage with the social/systemic dimension of lawyering, such as appreciating the role of multiple identities, implicit bias, privilege and power, and …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Analyzing Inhumane Practices In Mississippi’S Correctional Institutions Due To Overcrowding, Understaffing, And Diminished Funding, Ariel A. Williams

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to examine the political, social, and economic factors which have led to inhumane conditions in Mississippi’s correctional facilities. Several methods were employed, including a comparison of the historical and current methods of funding, staffing, and rehabilitating prisoners based on literature reviews. State-sponsored reports from various departments and the legislature were analyzed to provide insight into budgetary restrictions and political will to allocate funds. Statistical surveys and data were reviewed to determine how overcrowding and understaffing negatively affect administrative capacity and prisoners’ mental and physical well-being. Ultimately, it may be concluded that Mississippi has high …

Collared—A Film Case Study About Insider Trading And Ethics, Garrick Apollon

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This Article discusses the visual legal advocacy documentary film, Collared, by Garrick Apollon (author of this Article). Collared premiered in fall 2018 to a sold-out audience at the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto for the Hot Docs for Continuing Professional Education edutainment initiative. Collared features the story and reveals the testimony of a convicted ex-insider trader who is still struggling with the tragic consequences of “the most prolonged insider trading scheme ever discovered by American and Canadian securities investigators.” The intimate insights shared by former lawyer and reformed white-collar criminal, Joseph Grmovsek, serves as a painful reminder of the …

Punishing The Victim: Model Rule 1.16(A)(2) And Its Relation To Lawyers With Anxiety, Depression, And Bipolar Disorder, Daniel G. Esquivel

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming.

When Mental Health Meets “The One-Armed Man” Defense: How Courts Should Deal With Mccoy Defendants, Farid Seyyedi

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The Supreme Court’s opinion in McCoy v. Louisiana held that a defendant has a constitutional right to insist their attorney not concede guilt as to any element of an offense, even if doing so is the only reasonable trial strategy to give the defendant a chance at life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Under McCoy’s holding, a defendant can insist on maintaining their innocence—even in the face of overwhelming evidence—and force their attorney to pursue a defense that will land them on death row. The Supreme Court’s holding makes clear that a strategic concession of guilt at trial—over …

Duress In Immigration Law, Elizabeth A. Keyes

Seattle University Law Review

The doctrine of duress is common to other bodies of law, but the application of the duress doctrine is both unclear and highly unstable in immigration law. Outside of immigration law, a person who commits a criminal act out of well-placed fear of terrible consequences is different than a person who willingly commits a crime, but American immigration law does not recognize this difference. The lack of clarity leads to certain absurd results and demands reimagining, redefinition, and an unequivocal statement of the significance of duress in ascertaining culpability. While there are inevitably some difficult lines to be drawn in …

Microaggressions, Questionable Science, And Free Speech, Edward Cantu, Lee Jussim

Faculty Works

The topic of microaggressions is hot currently. Diversity administrators regularly propagate lists of alleged microaggressions and express confidence that listed items reflect what some psychologists claim they do: racism that is, at the very least, unconscious in the mind of the speaker. Legal academics are increasingly leveraging microaggression research in theorizing law and proposing legal change. But how scientifically legitimate are claims by some psychologists about what acts constitute microaggressions? The authors—one a law professor, the other a psychologist—argue that the answer is “not much.” In this article, the authors dissect the studies, and critique the claims, of microaggression researchers. …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

"Man Is Opposed To Fair Play": An Empirical Analysis Of How The Fifth Circuit Has Failed To Take Seriously Atkins V. Virginia, Michael L. Perlin, Talia Roitberg Harmon, Sarah Wetzel

Articles & Chapters

In 2002, for the first time, in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), the United States Supreme Court found that it violated the Eighth Amendment to subject persons with intellectual disabilities to the death penalty. Since that time, it has returned to this question multiple times, clarifying that inquiries into a defendant’s intellectual disability (for purposes of determining whether he is potentially subject to the death penalty) cannot be limited to a bare numerical “reading” of an IQ score, and that state rules based on superseded medical standards created an unacceptable risk that a person with intellectual disabilities could …

Court-Packing In 2021: Pathways To Democratic Legitimacy, Richard Mailey

Seattle University Law Review

This Article asks whether the openness to court-packing expressed by a number of Democratic presidential candidates (e.g., Pete Buttigieg) is democratically defensible. More specifically, it asks whether it is possible to break the apparent link between demagogic populism and court-packing, and it examines three possible ways of doing this via Bruce Ackerman’s dualist theory of constitutional moments—a theory which offers the possibility of legitimating problematic pathways to constitutional change on democratic but non-populist grounds. In the end, the Article suggests that an Ackermanian perspective offers just one, extremely limited pathway to democratically legitimate court-packing in 2021: namely, where a Democratic …

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

Research Across The Curriculum: Using Cognitive Science To Answer The Call For Better Legal Research Instruction, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The American Bar Association (ABA), law students, and employers are demanding that law schools do better when teaching legal research. Academic critics are demanding that law professors begin to apply the lessons from the science of learning to improve student outcomes. The practice of law is changing.

Yet, the data shows that law schools are not changing their legal research curriculum to respond to the need of their students or to address the ABA’s mandate. This stagnation comes at the same time as an explosion in legal information and a decrease in technical research skills among incoming students. This article …

Capitalizing On Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case For Law Firms To Promote And Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being, Jarrod F. Reich

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Beyond Microaggression: Overlapping Identities In Simulated Legal Practice, Peggy Cooper Davis, Danielle Davenport, Brence Pernell

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents