Social Psychology Commons^™

Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell

Faculty Working Papers

Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor's intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm's foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to …

If The Shoe Fits They Might Acquit: The Value Of Forensic Science Testimony, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

The probative value of forensic science evidence (such as a shoeprint) varies widely depending on how the evidence and hypothesis of interest is characterized. This paper uses a likelihood ratio (LR) approach to identify the probative value of forensic science evidence. It argues that the "evidence" component should be characterized as a "reported match," and that the hypothesis component should be characterized as "the matching person or object is the source of the crime scene sample." This characterization of the LR forces examiners to incorporate risks from sample mix-ups and examiner error into their match statistics. But how will legal …

Are We Responsible For Who We Are? The Challenge For Criminal Law Theory In The Defenses Of Coercive Indoctrination And "Rotten Social Background", Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Should coercive indoctrination or "rotten social background" be a defense to crime? Traditional desert-based excuse theory roundly rejects these defenses because the offender lacks cognitive or control dysfunction at the time of the offense. The standard coercive crime-control strategies of optimizing general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous similarly reject such defenses. Recognition of such defenses would tend to undermine, perhaps quite seriously, deterrence and incapacitation goals. Finally, the normative crime-control principle of empirical desert might support such an excuse, but only if the community's shared intuitions of justice support it. The law’s rejection of such defenses suggests that there …

Foreword: Advances In The Behavioral Analysis Of Law: Markets, Institutions, And Contracts, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Avishalom Tor, Special Editor

The collection of articles in this Special Issue is based on an international conference on Advances in the Behavioral Analysis of Law: Markets, Institutions, and Contracts that took place on December 8, 2009 at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law in Israel. The conference addressed cutting-edge legal issues at the intersection of law, economics, and psychology from a diverse set of viewpoints, bringing together scholars engaged in both theoretical and experimental behavioral analyses of law.

Gene-Environment Interactions, Criminal Responsibility, And Sentencing, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter in, Gene-Environment Interactions in Developmental Psychopathology (K. Dodge & M. Rutter, eds. 2011), considers the relevance of GxE to criminal responsibility and sentencing. It begins with a number of preliminary assumptions that will inform the analysis. It then turns to the law’s view of the person, including the law’s implicit psychology, and the criteria for criminal responsibility. A few false starts or distractions about responsibility are disposed of briefly. With this necessary background in place, the chapter then turns specifically to the relation between GxE and criminal responsibility. It suggests that GxE causes of criminal behavior have no …