Law and Psychology Commons^™

The Logician Versus The Linguist- An Empirical Tale Of Functional Discrimination In The Legal Academy, Andrea Kayne Kaufman

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This paper, focusing exclusively on gender, asks whether male and female law students express different preferences for logic-based learning models. A wide variety of educational theories and other theories have been used to conceptualize different learning preferences among law students but until now, none has focused on logical intelligence compared with the other intelligences. Using Harvard educational psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences, this paper describes an empirical study establishing that male and female law students express differences in preferring logical intelligence over the other intelligences. This paper introduces the concept of "functional discrimination," addressing the ways in which …

The Signaling Model Of Social Norms: Further Thoughts, Eric A. Posner

University of Richmond Law Review

One of the most notable trends in legal scholarship is the explosion of writing on social norms. Just a few years ago one might have argued that the scholarship was marginal, of interest to only a handful of law professors, but expressions of skepticism about the value of this scholarship have become rare. At the same time, it would be wrong to say that "law and social norms" ("LSN") is a movement or school within legal scholarship: the writings about this topic are too diverse, and there is little of that sense of forward movement that is characteristic of more …

Predicting Defection, Elmer J. Shaefer

University of Richmond Law Review

Eric Posner's cooperation theory of social norms develops from rational choice theory an austere and powerful explanation of why people comply with social norms. He illustrates his theory with subtle analysis of a number of legal issues. The book will help anyone influenced by law and economics to incorporate into her thinking the work in sociology, psychology, and ethics that bears on human behavior. Most readers will find applications for Posner's theory.

The Blurry Line Between "Mad" And "Bad": Is "Lack-Of-Control" A Workable Standard For Sexually Violent Predators?, Georgia Smith Hamilton

University of Richmond Law Review

In January 1993, thirty-one-year-old Michael Crane entered a tanning salon in Johnson County, Kansas and exposed himself to the nineteen-year-old female attendant. Thirty minutes later, he entered a nearby video store and waited for all of the customers to leave. Once the store was empty, Crane exposed himself to the twenty-year-old female clerk, threatened to rape her, grabbed her by the back of the neck, and demanded that she perform oral sex on him. He then suddenly and abruptly stopped the attack and ran out ofthe store.

Punitive Damages: How Jurors Fail To Promote Efficiency, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Evidence of corporate risk-cost balancing often leads to inefficient punitive damages awards, suggesting that jurors fail to base their decision making on principles of economic efficiency. In this Article, Professor Viscusi presents the results of two experiments regarding jury behavior and punitive damages. In the first experiment, Professor Viscusi found that mock jurors punish companies for balancing risk against cost, although award levels vary depending on how the economic analysis is presented at trial. The results of the second experiment suggested that mock jurors are unwilling or unable to follow a set of model jury instructions designed to generate efficient …

The Progress Of Passion, Kathryn Abrams

Michigan Law Review

Like an abandoned fortress, the dichotomy between reason and the passions casts a long shadow over the domain of legal thought. Beset by forces from legal realism to feminist epistemology, this dichotomy no longer holds sovereign sway. Yet its structure helps to articulate the boundaries of the legal field; efforts to move in and around it infuse present thinking with the echoes of a conceptually distinct past. Early critics of the dichotomy may unwittingly have prolonged its influence through the frontal character of their attacks. By challenging a strong distinction between emotion and reason, critics kept it, paradoxically, before legal …

An Overview: International Human Rights And Mental Disability Law, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Chimes Of Freedom: International Human Rights And Institutional Mental Disability Law, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

What's Good Is Bad, What's Bad Is Good, You'll Find Out When You Reach The Top, You're On The Bottom: Are The Americans With Disabilities Act (And Olmstead V. L.C.) Anything More Than 'Idiot Wind', Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Mental Disability law is contaminated by "sanism," an irrational prejudice similar to such other irrational prejudices as racism and sexism. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) - a statute that focused specifically on questions of stereotyping and stigma - appeared at first to offer an opportunity too deal frontally with sanist attitudes and, optimally, to restructure the way that citizens with mental disabilities were dealt with by the remainder of society. However, in its first decade, the ADA did not prove to be a panacea for such persons. The Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. …

Fallen Superheroes And Constitutional Mirages: The Tale Of Brady V. Maryland, Scott E. Sundby

Articles

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Patients: An Exception To The Federal Psychotherapist-Patient Privilege, Huston Combs

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Crime And Consciousness: Science And Involuntary Acts , Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article confronts this clash between legal and scientific perspectives on consciousness by proposing new ways to structure the voluntary act requirement so that it incorporates the insights of modern science on the human mind. Part I examines the criminal law's voluntary act requirement, particularly in the context of the MPC's influential provision, which reflects the law and psychology of the era in which the MPC was originally developed--the 1950s. Part II analyzes the new science of “consciousness,” a term that typically refers to the sum of a person's thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as the everyday circumstances and …

International Environmental Law And Emotional Rational Choice, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This paper considers how emotions can foster compliance by rational actors with international environmental law. Many environmental issues are highly emotionally charged. Both supporters of and opponents to international environmental law often feel very strongly about their positions and views. A psychological game-theoretic model focuses on the disciplinary role that losing face may play in compliance with international environmental law. This model implies that non-compliance, especially by high-profile international actors, should be highly and swiftly publicized upon detection and verification. The model also explains why actors care so much about soft, that is, non-binding international environmental law, such as international …

"What's Good Is Bad, What's Bad Is Good, You'll Find Out When You Reach The Top, You're On The Bottom": Are The Americans With Disabilities Act (And Olmstead V. L. C.) Anything More Than "Idiot Wind?", Michael L. Perlin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Mental disability law is contaminated by "sanism, " an irrational prejudice similar to such other irrational prejudices as racism and sexism. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)-a statute that focused specifically on questions of stereotyping and stigma-appeared at first to offer an opportunity to deal frontally with sanist attitudes and, optimally, to restructure the way that citizens with mental disabilities were dealt with by the remainder of society. However, in its first decade, the ADA did not prove to be a panacea for such persons. The Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. - ruling that …

Personology, Profiling, And The Terrorist, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article identifies problems in common approaches to capturing the psychological essence of the terrorist.

Making The Familiar Conventional Again, Steven L. Winter

Michigan Law Review

In 1984, Gerald López published his groundbreaking and still remarkable Lay Lawyering, employing then-recent developments in cognitive science to reexamine and reconfigure basic questions of law and legal reasoning. Three years later, Charles Lawrence's The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism used insights from cognitive and Freudian psychology to probe the problem of racism and the inadequacy of the law's response. George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things appeared that same year. It was followed by a series of articles in which I examined a range of legal and theoretical issues in light of the new …

Attorney-Client Confidentiality And The Assessment Of Claimants Who Allege Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Robert H. Aronson, Lonnie Rosenwald, Gerald M. Rosen

Washington Law Review

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was first recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. A PTSD diagnosis requires an individual or individual's loved ones to have experienced a traumatic event that was a threat to life or physical integrity and caused the individual to react to the incident with a specific number of avoidance, reexperiencing, and hyper-arousal symptoms. Obtaining a PTSD diagnosis can be of great value to a personal-injury plaintiff who claims damages due to a traumatic event. Further, if the traumatic event is unquestioned and the individual reports the classic symptoms, a PTSD diagnosis is relatively easy to …

I Am Having A Flashback ... All The Way To The Bank: The Application Of The Thin Skull Rule To Mental Injuries - Poole V. Copland, Inc., Scott M. Eden

North Carolina Central Law Review

No abstract provided.

Something Is Rotten In The Interrogation Room: Let's Try Video Oversight, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 537 (2001), Wayne T. Westling

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law, Self-Pollution, And The Management Of Social Anxiety, Geoffrey P. Miller

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This article considers the anxieties about masturbation and spermatorrhoea from the standpoint of cultural-legal analysis. Seen from this perspective, the worries about masturbation provided an object onto which social anxieties could be displaced and thereby managed. Norm entrepreneurs who played on public fears manipulated basic cultural polarities in order to present masturbation and spermatorrhoea as objects of horror and disgust-things that needed to be expelled, if possible, from the body social.

Punishing Thought: A Narrative Deconstructing The Interpretive Dance Of Hate Crime Legislation, 35 J. Marshall L. Rev. 123 (2001), Anne B. Ryan

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Not Interaction But Melding - The "Russian Dressing" Theory Of Emotions: An Explanation Of The Phenomenology Of Emotions And Rationality With Suggested Related Maxims For Judges And Other Legal Decision Makers, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

Even after centuries of contrary philosophy and psychology, many commentators, jurisprudes, and law makers insist that emotions have no legitimate place in most legal decision making. This recalcitrance, of course, is misplaced in light of the powerful body of theory explaining that without emotions, decisions, including matters of law and policy, simply cannot be made. Judges, along with all societal actors, must disabuse themselves of the fallacious belief that emotions obstruct or obscure reason in all endeavors, particularly morality, law, and justice.

The project of truly apprehending emotions, however, requires more than appreciating that they play a crucial role in …

Moral Courage And Civility, William I. Miller

Articles

Here follow some words from the book which, given our lost sense of security and innocence in light of Pearl Harbor II of Sept. 11, 2001, turns out to have a more pressing relevance than it had when I wrote it a couple of years ago.

Rescue And The War Story, William I. Miller

Articles

It is precisely in the domain of rescue that twentieth-century battle has made its peculiar addition to the styles of the heroic.

Hidden Agendas And Ripple Effects: Implications Of Four Recent Supreme Court Decisions For Forensic Mental Health Professionals, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Supreme Court decisions have implications far beyond the legal principles they articulate, and it is essential that individuals working in the forensic mental health and correctional systems understand the extent to which such decisions can affect their practice and the facilities in which they work. The seemingly-unrelated cases of Godinez v. Moran (1993) (establishing a unitary standard for the determinations of competency to plead guilty, competency to waive counsel, and competency to stand trial), Kansas v. Hendricks (1997) (upholding the constitutionality of one state's “Sexually Violent Predator Act”), Pennsylvania Department of Corrections v. Yeskey (1998) (ruling that the Americans with …

Trends. Terrorism, Terror Management, And Faking Mental Disorder, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article highlights the difficulty of determining if defendants on trial are faking mental disorder. The case in question involves the bombing of United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Product-Related Risk And Cognitive Biases: The Shortcomings Of Enterprise Liability, James A. Henderson Jr., Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Products liability law has witnessed a long debate over whether manufacturers should be held strictly liable for the injuries that products cause. Recently, some have argued that psychological research on human judgment supports adopting a regime of strict enterprise liability for injuries caused by product design. These new proponents of enterprise liability argue that the current system, in which manufacturer liability for product design turns on the manufacturer's negligence, allows manufacturers to induce consumers into undertaking inefficiently dangerous levels or types of consumption. In this paper we argue that the new proponents of enterprise liability have: (1) not provided any …

Using Bargaining For Advantage In Law School Negotiation Courses, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Options, options, options ....The Negotiation literature-at least the "problem-solving" or "interestbased" or "principled" negotiation literature'repeats this mantra over and over and over. It seems self-evident that having lots of options is a good idea because more options means more to choose from. The more options there are to choose from, however, the more difficult choosing can be. Options, in short, may increase the likelihood that one will make an optimal decision, but they impose added "decision costs" on the decision maker. Law professors now face this happy dilemma when choosing materials for their Negotiation courses. Options abound-including the negotiation chapters …

Trends. Homosexual Politics And Security: The American Psychological Association (Apa) Brief Of Amicus Curiae No. 99-699, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article discusses the American Psychological Association's (APA's) brief of amicus curiae, which the APA submitted in order to provide a context for the Supreme Court of the United States to review the policy of the Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council, Boy Scouts of America, which involved the Boy Scouts, homosexuality, and claims about discrimination against homosexuals.

One Crime, Many Convicted: Dissociative Identity Disorder And The Exclusion Of Expert Testimony In State V. Greene, Mary Eileen Crego

Washington Law Review

In State v. Greene, the Supreme Court of Washington held that expert testimony about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) was not admissible to support an insanity or diminished-capacity defense. Even though the court acknowledged DID as a generally accepted medical disorder, the court reasoned that such testimony would not be helpful to the trier of fact, as required by Washington Evidence Rule (ER) 702, because the court has not established a specific standard for determining the legal responsibility of a defendant with multiple personalities. This Note argues that the Greene court had sufficient scientific evidence to establish a legal standard …