Law and Psychology Commons^™

Mental Health Outcomes Of Various Types Of Fear Among University Students Who Have An Undocumented Legal Status During The Donald Trump Presidency, Liliana Campos

Doctoral Dissertations

Having an undocumented legal status is a risk factor for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety among university students. Much of the literature on the experiences of university students who hold an undocumented legal status has primarily focused on better understanding the educational, social, financial, and legal challenges among undergraduate students. The literature has addressed how some of these difficulties impact components of their social and mental health wellness. Yet, there is still a dearth of research focused on further understanding the experiences of students who hold an undocumented legal status from a psychological perspective, and specifically, with ...

Modify State “Piracy” After Allen: Introducing Apology To The U.S. Copyright Regime, Runhua Wang

Buffalo Law Review

Copyright protection from state offenders is onerous because of the imbalanced bargaining power between states and authors, which is increased by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Allen v. Cooper. This decision clarifies that state sovereign immunity is not abrogated by the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (“CRCA”). It secures states’ constitutional rights, the public interest, and the efficiency of copyright infringement litigations against states. However, a paradox of this decision is that it may harm innovation incentives or spirits of creativity due to the increased imbalanced bargaining power to prevent authors from being repaired for their economic ...

Blurred Lines: How To Rationally Understand The “Rational Understanding” Doctrine After Madison V. Alabama, Cassidy Young

Pepperdine Law Review

In Madison v. Alabama, the Supreme Court held that a capital inmate’s inability to remember his crime did not render him incompetent to be executed. The Court reasoned that an individual who suffers from episodic memory loss may still “rationally understand” society’s reasons for sentencing him to death for a crime he once committed. This Note explores the impact of memory loss on a person’s self-identity, and consequently challenges the notion that a capital inmate who no longer remembers his crime can truly have a rational understanding of it. Specifically, this Note examines how memory loss substantially ...

Consent, Informed: Rethinking Informed Consent & Competency For Patients With Schizophrenia & Anosognosia, Nina Labovich

Boston College Law Review

Anosognosia is a common symptom of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder that renders individuals unable to understand that they are living with a disease. This symptom often leads people to refuse anti-psychotic medication, and may increase an individual’s likelihood of becoming homeless or incarcerated. When courts find individuals to be a danger to others or themselves, states can impose involuntary commitment. When a state grants involuntary commitment, however, a court may find the individual remains competent to refuse medication. This Note argues that documented anosognosia requires a finding of incompetency, whether people are a danger to themselves or not. Science ...

The True Benefit Of The Bargain: How Emotional Distress Damages Make Fraud Victims Whole, Jonathan G. Lester

Boston College Law Review

For over a century, American courts have recognized emotional distress damages in tort. Initially, these decisions limited recovery for emotional distress to cases where the victim experienced a physical impact. Throughout the twentieth century, that requirement largely fell out of favor as courts began to recognize emotional injury in the absence of physical harm, supported by new psychiatric research. Despite this, the availability of emotional distress damages in fraud cases continues to divide jurisdictions. Many jurisdictions refuse to recognize any more than pecuniary damages to plaintiffs in fraud, characterizing fraud as a purely economic tort. The experience of victims challenges ...

Before And After Hinckley: Legal Insanity In The United States, Stephen J. Morse

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This chapter first considers the direction of the affirmative defense of legal insanity in the United States before John Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity in 1982 for attempting to assassinate President Reagan and others and the immediate aftermath of that acquittal. Since the middle of the 20^th Century, the tale is one of the rise and fall of the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code test for legal insanity. Then it turns to the constitutional decisions of the United States Supreme Court concerning the status of legal insanity. Finally, it addresses the substantive and procedural changes ...

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.

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 unattended ...

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 ...

Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This article was presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal Volume 53, Issue 2.

The thesis of this article is simple: As long as we maintain the current folk psychological conception of ourselves as intentional and potentially rational creatures, as people and not simply as machines, mental states will inevitably remain central to ascriptions of culpability and responsibility more generally. It is also desirable. Nonetheless, we are in a condition of unprecedented internal ...

School “Safety” Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread “security” measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective—and constitutionally compliant—alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children ...

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 ...

Finding Parity Through Preclusion: Novel Mental Health Parity Solutions At The State Level, Ryan D. Kingshill

Dickinson Law Review

Recently, the federal government has taken numerous steps to promote the equal treatment (also known as parity) of mental and physical health issues. The two most impactful actions are the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act of 2008 and the Affordable Care Act. These acts focus on the traditional avenue for parity change—insurance regulation. While these acts have improved parity, major gaps in coverage and treatment between mental health/substance use disorder treatment and medical/surgical treatment persist. ERISA Preemption, evasive insurer behavior, lack of enforcement, and lack of consumer education continue to plague patients and healthcare professionals. On ...

A Page-Turner With A Social Conscience: Requiem For A Female Serial Killer By Phyllis Chesler, Paula J. Caplan

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Images Of Reach, Range, And Recognition: Thinking About Emotions In The Study Of International Law, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

There is much critical potential in bringing together the philosophy of emotion and the study of international law. Narratives about legitimate political and legal authority have tended to either assume that it is possible to extricate emotions from political judgement, or to rest upon uncomplicated (and wholly demystified) assumptions about the legibility of emotions over time and place. Philosophers interested in emotion have regularly grappled with questions concerning an emotion’s reach and range (insofar that the emotion in question bears an intersubjective component), and recognition (comprehensibility) of emotions beyond one’s own social and political communities (or even beyond ...

Fair Questions: A Call And Proposal For Using General Verdicts With Special Interrogatories To Prevent Biased And Unjust Convictions, Charles E. Hintz

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Bias and other forms of logical corner-cutting are an unfortunate aspect of criminal jury deliberations. However, the preferred verdict system in the federal courts, the general verdict, does nothing to counter that. Rather, by forcing jurors into a simple binary choice — guilty or not guilty — the general verdict facilitates and encourages such flawed reasoning. Yet the federal courts continue to stick to the general verdict, ironically out of a concern that deviating from it will harm defendants by leading juries to convict.

This Essay calls for a change: expand the use of a special findings verdict, the general verdict with ...

The Use Of Force To Prevent Recurrence Of Conflict: Where Are The Limits Of Self-Defense?, Laurie R. Blank

Brooklyn Law Review

The prohibition on the use of force is the central pillar of the international system of peace and security, and yet contemporary conflicts continue to stretch and pressure this foundational rule. This article examines how international law applies to the use of force in the territory of another state for the purpose of preventing a resurgence of violence after a conflict has ended. In the absence of consent or U.N. Security Council authorization, can self-defense be a justification for a state to use force to prevent the resurgence of conflict? In January 2018, the United States announced an intended ...

Sane, Manipulative Self-Harm: When Hostage And Hostage Taker Become One, John R. Fitzgerald

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to ...