Law and Psychology Commons^™

Science Or Status Quo? Disregard For A Defendant's Mental Illness In Tort Suits, Gabrielle Lindquist

Washington Law Review Online

Mental illness is almost never considered when courts determine whether a defendant is liable for a tort. Nearly every United States jurisdiction—Washington state included—declines to offer a modified “reasonable person” standard for negligent tort defendants with mental illnesses or any form of mental illness-based affirmative defense for intentional tort defendants. There is much debate about whether tort law should evolve to accommodate defendants with mental illnesses. This Comment seeks to dive deeper into why that debate persists.

Although there are numerous justifications for this current state of tort law, the most common rationalizations given are twofold. First, that the primary …

Discounting Credibility: Doubting The Stories Of Women Survivors Of Sexual Harassment, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, federal and state laws have prohibited sexual harassment on the job; despite this fact, extraordinarily high rates of gender-based workplace harassment still permeate virtually every sector of the American workforce. Public awareness of the seriousness and scope of the problem increased astronomically in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as women began to publicly share countless stories of harassment and abuse. In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace published an important study analyzing a wide range of factors contributing to this phenomenon. But the study devotes only limited …

Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Paul R. Mchugh, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Paul R. McHugh and Gerard V. Bradley expose the flawed reasoning of Bostock.

Productive Mindset Interventions Mitigate Psychological Friction And Improve Well-Being For Bar Exam Takers, Victor D. Quintanilla, Sam Erman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

By participating in a brief productive mindset intervention, prospective lawyers improved their wellbeing and performance on the California Bar Exam. Those are the initial results of the research conducted by our interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research team with support from AccessLex Institute and in partnership with the State Bar of California. It did so by mitigating psychological friction and helping test takers reframe stressful experiences. This column discusses our findings and the implications for efforts to make evidence-based gains in bar exam performance, wellbeing, and attorney licensure systems.

Retribution As Ancient Artifact And Modern Malady, Molly J. Walker Wilson

Lewis & Clark Law Review

One of the oldest and most entrenched goals of punishment is retribution, which is the idea that inflicting pain on someone who has committed a wrong is a worthwhile goal, regardless of any other benefits or harms that may result. Retribution has been the justification for increasingly punitive policies in the United States, the effect of which has decimated communities of color, strapped taxpayers with huge associated costs, and increased crime rates. It is difficult to understand why we perpetuate harmful policies based on “just deserts” until we consider that the foundation of these policies is moral outrage—a powerful, automatic, …

You That Build The Death Planes: Bob Dylan, War And International Affairs, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Several years ago, I wrote that Bob Dylan was “a scholar with a well-developed jurisprudence on a range of topics including civil, criminal, public, and private law” (Perlin, 2011, p.1396). In that article, I discussed and analyzed Dylan songs that dealt with, variously, civil rights, inequality in the criminal and civil justice systems, institutions, governmental/judicial corruption, equality and emancipation, and the role of lawyers in the legal process. (Id.). But I noted that I was omitting – for space considerations – any discussion of Dylan songs dealing with war and international affairs (Id., p. 1398, n. 15).

In this paper, …

Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Document Review: You’Re Doing It Wrong Cognitive Psychology And The Attorney’S Mental Plate, Robert Keeling

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can You Hear Me Later And Believe Me Now? Behavioral Law And Economics Of Chronic Repeated Ambient Acoustic Pollution Causing Noise-Induced (Hidden) Hearing Loss, Peter H. Huang, Kelly J. Poore

Publications

This Article analyzes the public health issues of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (“NIHL”) and Noise-Induced Hidden Hearing Loss (“NIHHL”) due to Chronic Repeated Ambient Acoustic Pollution (“CRAAP”). This Article examines the clinical and empirical medical data about NIHL and NIHHL and its normative implications. It applies behavioral law and economics and information economics to advance legal policies to reduce CRAAP. Finally, this Article advocates changing individual and social attitudes about deafness and hearing loss to raise political awareness and social consciousness about NIHL and NIHHL. One way to change our attitudes is by practicing compassion, empathy, and kindness, including Loving-Kindness Mindfulness …

Trauma-Informed Advocacy: Learning To Empathize With Unspeakable Horrors, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Unreasonable, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The concept of “reasonableness” permeates the law: the “reasonable person” determines the outcome of torts and contracts disputes, the criminal burden of proof requires factfinders to reach conclusions “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and claims of self-defense succeed or fail on reasonableness determinations. But as any first-year law student can attest, the line between reasonable and unreasonable is not always clear. Nor is that the only ambiguity. In the realm of the unreasonable, many of us intuit that some actions are not only unreasonable but beyond the pale—we might say they are beyond unreasonable. Playing football, summiting Nanga Parbat, and attempting …

The Fog Of Blackacre: Exploring Depression, Anxiety, And Stress Of The American Law Student, Amanda Carey

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between depression, anxiety, and stress among first-year law students and the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Surveys using the DASS–21, DREEM questionnaire, Satisfaction with Life scale and qualitative questions were administered to first-year law students at 44 randomly selected law schools across the United States. In the largest modern mental health study to date, responses totaled 5% of the first-year law student population. Results showed no significant relationship between depression, anxiety, and stress of first-year law students and the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Substantial depression, anxiety, and stress of first-year law students …

Can The International Criminal Court Succeed? An Analysis Of The Empirical Evidence Of Violence Prevention, Stuart Ford

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

Despite significant optimism about the future of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) during its early years, recently there has been growing criticism of it by both scholars and governments. As a result, there appears to be more doubt about the ICC’s ability to succeed now than at any other point in its history. So, are the critics correct? Is the ICC failing? No. This Article argues that, not only can the ICC succeed, there is strong evidence that it is already succeeding. It analyzes several recent empirical articles that have convincingly demonstrated that the ICC prevents serious violations of international …

Experiments With Suppression: The Evolution Of Repressive Legality In Britain In The Revolutionary Period, Christopher M. Roberts

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

This article is concerned with the structure of repressive governance, and how it has evolved historically. It examines this theme through an exploration of the manner which repressive laws and institutions evolved in Britain over the course of the late eighteenth century. In particular, it reviews the various measures that British authorities utilized and relied upon in order to confront a growing wave of calls for social and political reforms. These included a policy of aggressive prosecutions of dissidents; the creation of new institutions such as the Home Office designed to enhance the powers of the central authorities; extralegal measures …

Neuroscience And Mental Competency: Current Uses And Future Potential, John B. Meixner Jr.

Scholarly Works

One major conundrum in the field of law and neuroscience is that the mental states that are most relevant to legal determinations are often mental states that occurred in the past, and can longer be assessed. Could the defendant, at the time he committed the crime, have had the cognitive capacity to satisfy the required mens rea for the crime charged? Was an individual's tortious conduct intentional or inadvertent? Even if the field of neuroscience eventually gains the ability to provide data relevant to understanding of immediate mental states, those data will be unavailable to legal actors by the time …