Law and Psychology Commons^™

Place Names And Presidential Control, Austin Kruse

Northwestern University Law Review

Since the start of his second term, President Trump has issued executive orders at an extraordinary pace, using them to advance a broader ideological agenda across the administrative state. While scholarly attention has largely focused on the most sweeping of these directives, less prominent orders raise similar concerns about the reach of presidential power. This Note examines one such order: Executive Order 14,172, which directs the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali and expands presidential influence over the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN).

Although geographic naming is ostensibly apolitical, place names are deeply entangled with questions of …

Against Monetary Primacy, Yair Listokin, Rory Van Loo

Northwestern University Law Review

To reduce inflation, the Federal Reserve (Fed) raises interest rates. But every month with high interest rates increases the risk of a devastating recession. Recessions impose not only short-term pain in the form of widespread unemployment but also lifelong harm for many, as vulnerable workers and those who start their careers during a downturn never fully recover. Yet hiking interest rates is the centerpiece of U.S. inflation-fighting policy. When inflation is high, the Fed raises interest rates until inflation is tamed, regardless of the consequent sacrifices. We call this inflation-fighting paradigm “monetary primacy.” Despite its great risks, monetary primacy has …

"Legally Magic" Words: An Empirical Study Of The Accessibility Of Fifth Amendment Rights, Roseanna Sommers, Kate Weisburd

Northwestern University Law Review

Fifth Amendment case law (including Miranda v. Arizona) requires that individuals assert their right to counsel or silence using “explicit,” “clear,” and “unambiguous” statements—or, as some dissenting judges have lamented, using “legally magic” words. Through a survey of 1,718 members of the U.S. public, we investigate what ordinary people believe it takes to assert the right to counsel and the right to silence. We then compare their perceptions against prevailing legal standards governing invocation.

With respect to the right to counsel, the survey results indicate that members of the public have a uniformly lower threshold for invocation than do …

A Feedback Loop Of Exclusion: The Treatment Of Bilingualism In The Courtroom, Simone Stover

Northwestern University Law Review

In the 1991 case Hernandez v. New York, the United States Supreme Court characterized bilingualism as a race-neutral trait that can be used to exclude individuals from jury service. This Note proceeds by demonstrating how the current state of the law undermines the interests of bilingual individuals and then proposes a solution. Focusing specifically on Hispanic bilingual Spanish speakers, this Note first employs Professor Jennifer Lackey’s multi-directional credibility model to show that bilingual Spanish speakers suffer injustice in the courtroom due to both credibility deficits and excesses. Following this analysis, it proposes a possible solution to this issue: an …

The Conundrums Of Hate Crime Prevention, Shirin Sinnar

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The recent surge in hate crimes alongside persistent concerns over policing and prisons has catalyzed new interest in hate crime prevention outside the criminal legal system. While policymakers, civil rights groups, and people in targeted communities internally disagree on the value of hate crime laws and law enforcement responses to hate crimes, they often converge in advocating measures that could prevent hate crimes from occurring in the first place. Those measures potentially include educational initiatives, conflict resolution programs, political reforms, social services, or other proactive efforts aimed at the root causes of hate crimes.

Focusing on the public conversation around …

The Science Of Solitary: Expanding The Harmfulness Narrative, Craig Haney

Northwestern University Law Review

The harmful effects of solitary confinement have been established in a variety of direct observations and empirical studies that date back to the nineteenth century, conducted in many different countries by researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. This Essay argues that these effects should be situated and understood in the context of a much larger scientific literature that documents the adverse and sometimes life- threatening psychological and physical consequences of social isolation, social exclusion, loneliness, and the deprivation of caring human touch as they occur in free society. These dangerous conditions are the hallmarks of solitary confinement. Yet they are imposed …

Panel Discussion: The Right To Education: With Liberty, Justice, And Education For All?

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Diversity Entitlement: Does Diversity-Benefits Ideology Undermine Inclusion?, Kyneshawau Hurd, Victoria C. Plaut

Northwestern University Law Review

Ideologies are most successful (or most dangerous) when they become common-sense—when they become widely accepted, taken-for-granted truths—because these truths subsequently provide implicit guidelines and expectations about what is moral, legitimate, and necessary in our society. In Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the Court, without a majority opinion, considered and dismissed all but one of several “common-sense” rationales for affirmative action in admissions. While eschewing rationales that focused on addressing discrimination and underrepresentation, the Court found that allowing all students to obtain the educational benefits that flow from diversity was a compelling rationale—essential, even, for a quality education. …

Eyes Wide Open: What Social Science Can Tell Us About The Supreme Court's Use Of Social Science, Jonathan P. Feingold, Evelyn R. Carter

Northwestern University Law Review

The Northwestern University Law Review’s 2017 Symposium asked whether McCleskey v. Kemp closed the door on social science’s ability to meaningfully contribute to equal protection deliberations. This inquiry is understandable; McCleskey is widely understood to have rendered statistical racial disparities doctrinally irrelevant in the equal protection context. We suggest, however, that this account overstates McCleskey and its doctrinal impact. Roughly fifteen years after McCleskey, Chief Justice William Rehnquist—himself part of the McCleskey majority—invoked admissions data to support his conclusion that the University of Michigan Law School unconstitutionally discriminated against white applicants.

Chief Justice Rehnquist’s disparate treatment of statistical …

The Concept Of “Unusual Punishments” In Anglo-American Law: The Death Penalty As Arbitrary, Discriminatory, And Cruel And Unusual, John D. Bessler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, like the English Bill of Rights before it, safeguards against the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments.” To better understand the meaning of that provision, this Article explores the concept of “unusual punishments” and its opposite, “usual punishments.” In particular, this Article traces the use of the “usual” and “unusual” punishments terminology in Anglo-American sources to shed new light on the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. The Article surveys historical references to “usual” and “unusual” punishments in early English and American texts, then analyzes the development of American constitutional law as …

Panel Discussion: Author Meets Critic

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: Ethnographic Evidence

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Looking At Justice Through A Lens Of Healing And Reconnection, Annalise Buth, Lynn Cohn

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: Expanding Our Conception Of Justice

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Amoral Machines, Or: How Roboticists Can Learn To Stop Worrying And Love The Law, Bryan Casey

Northwestern University Law Review

The media and academic dialogue surrounding high-stakes decisionmaking by robotics applications has been dominated by a focus on morality. But the tendency to do so while overlooking the role that legal incentives play in shaping the behavior of profit-maximizing firms risks marginalizing the field of robotics and rendering many of the deepest challenges facing today’s engineers utterly intractable. This Essay attempts to both halt this trend and offer a course correction. Invoking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s canonical analogy of the “bad man . . . who cares nothing for . . . ethical rules,” it demonstrates why philosophical abstractions like …

Let Them Frye: Frye Hearings For Determination Of "Mental Disorders" In The Sexually Violent Persons Act, Hannah Henkel

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Specific laws aimed at the confinement of mentally disabled sexually violent persons have existed for years. Originally, these laws aimed to rehabilitate a person within a mental hospital and help him with his disorders, aiming to help him enter back into society. However, throughout the years, the laws morphed into ways to keep convicted criminals from society after their prison sentence ended for fear of potential future crimes. In Illinois, the courts find a man falls within the sexually violent persons law when he remains too dangerous to be released after his criminal confinement. A person must have a “mental …

Commitment And Entrenchment In Corporate Governance, K.J. Martijn Cremers, Saura Masconale, Simone M. Sepe

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past twenty years, a growing number of empirical studies have provided evidence that governance arrangements protecting incumbents from removal promote managerial entrenchment, reducing firm value. As a result of these studies, “good” corporate governance is widely understood today as being about stronger shareholder rights.

This Article rebuts this view, presenting new empirical evidence that challenges the results of prior studies and developing a novel theoretical account of what really matters in corporate governance. Employing a unique dataset that spans from 1978 to 2008, we document that protective arrangements that require shareholder approval—such as staggered boards and supermajority requirements …