Law and Psychology Commons^™

Exploring The Dynamics And Outcomes Of Family Engagement In Child Welfare Services: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach, Jianchao Lai, Michelle Graef, Todd Franke

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Background: Engaging families effectively in child welfare services remains a persistent challenge, shaped by complex interactions between agency practices and family circumstances. While existing research has explored this issue, it has predominantly relied on data from agency and caseworker perspectives, often overlooking the crucial viewpoint of the families. Objectives: This study investigates families’ subjective experiences and perceptions within the child welfare system, focusing on their satisfaction with child welfare workers and overall engagement. Methods: The study draws on data collected through an evaluation of the implementation of Alternative Response in a Midwestern state. Agency administrative data is integrated with additional …

Guided Autonomy: A Research-Based Approach To Improving Students' Wellbeing And Decision-Making In The Development Of Problem-Solving Skills, Jonathan E. Moore

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Law schools and the legal profession face a wellbeing crisis. Law students and lawyers suffer from high rates of depression, substance abuse, and job dissatisfaction. Research shows that cultivating autonomy—the sense of control over one’s own decisions and actions—is key to wellbeing and success in legal education and practice. Yet, fostering autonomy in new law students is challenging, as too much independence too soon can overwhelm learners and increase stress. This article introduces a “guided autonomy” approach for law students, with a focus specifically on legal writing courses. The article combines insights from Self-Determination Theory and Cognitive Load Theory to …

Intuitions In Tort Law And Theory, James A. Macleod

Articles

This Essay highlights the many ways that ordinary conceptual and moral intuitions shape the development of tort law. It further argues that, for a range of doctrinal and institutional reasons, such intuitions deserve a central place in tort theorists’ efforts to explain, predict, justify, and reform the law of torts. Finally, given the stakes for both positive and normative tort theory, the Essay emphasizes the need for more systematic empirical research into the content and operation of people’s tort-relevant intuitions.

The Violence Of Bright Lines, Terrell Woolfolk, Kathryn E. Miller

Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Eighth Amendment to prohibit members of certain groups from serving extreme punishments, such as the death penalty and life without parole. For example, the Court has long banned death sentences for people with intellectual disability and for those who were under eighteen years old at the time of their crime. More recently, in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, the Court extended this reasoning to sentences of life without parole for those under eighteen—prohibiting the sentence altogether for nonhomicide crimes and barring its mandatory imposition for homicides.

Many scholars and advocates have applauded …

Exploring The Impact Of Attorneys With Exposed Tattoos On Jurors, Diego F. Mahoney

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Within the legal field, there appears to be a pervasive stigmatization of exposed tattoos. Law firms justify their explicit or implicit bans on exposed body art by arguing that tattoos could negatively prejudice jurors who may be biased against people with tattoos. This thesis intends to put that notion to the test via a digital survey. Subjects who meet the qualifications to serve as a juror in the United States were shown one of two identical videos of an opening statement. However, in one video the attorney has a neck tattoo, whereas in the other the attorney does not. Subjects …

Law School Veterans Clinics: Helping Veterans, Training Students, Improving The System, Alexander W. Scherr

Scholarly Works

This essay makes the case for law schools to create clinics and externship courses that address the needs of veterans. Veterans legal work offers excellent opportunities to represent individual veterans to obtain the benefits they earned through service to our country. At the same time, veterans clinic work can enlist students in systemic advocacy that changes how institutions address veterans' needs through appellate, administrative, and class action advocacy. Law students who work in veterans clinics develop skills they can readily transfer to other practice areas while working closely with clients and developing their professional identities. Finally, veterans clinics help law …

"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 …

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

Law & Economics Working Papers

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 …

The Consequences And Constitutionality Of Training Police To Blame Victims, Margareth Etienne, Richard H. Mcadams

William & Mary Law Review

A common technique in American interrogations is “moral minimization,” in which investigators excuse or justify the suspect’s criminal behavior on moral grounds. A surprising type of moral minimization is explicit victim-blaming, which includes blaming the victim by endorsing negative stereotypes on the basis of gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, what we call victim-blaming-bystereotype. No one has previously considered the policy wisdom or constitutionality of this technique. We explore the unintended consequences. One cost is the secondary victimization of those who suffer from crime, especially when they discover how detectives have disparaged them. The second is the effect on the …

Public Men's Rooms And The Legal Construction Of Gender And Privacy, Steven J. Macias

University of Cincinnati Law Review

This Article examines how the law is complicit in educating and socializing children into the cultural practices of gender and privacy. It accomplishes this by analyzing case law that involves minors and men’s public bathrooms. The men’s room is a place rife with social ambiguity, an ambiguity that has come to a head in recent transgender school bathroom cases. Although this Article is primarily concerned with the men’s bathroom as an important legal site in the development of gender and privacy for all youth, it discusses transgender (trans) rights cases as presenting the most fundamental challenge to the hegemonic logic …

Maine's Unintentional Murder Statute: Depraved Indifference On Trial, Louis B. Butterfield

Maine Law Review

Perhaps nowhere in the law is the demand for reason and justice more compelling than in the penal law, and nowhere in the penal law is the need for fairness greater than in the law defining murder. The notion of fairness in Anglo-American criminal law is embodied in the concept of mens rea. For over three hundred years, the basic tenet of penal law has been that "actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea." A mens rea element serves to define a crime in positive terms and also provides the basis for defenses that negate the subjective culpability element. …

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 …

An Updated Practical Guide To Taking And Defending Depositions, Gary S. Gildin

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The deposition offers a singular opportunity to handcuff the deponent to an irreversible script. Consequently, both the attorney taking the deposition and defending counsel must prepare for and conduct the deposition with equal if not greater care than the trial.

Traditionally, lawyers have used the deposition to discover facts relating to the legal elements and the credibility, perception, and recollection of the witness. However, recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as to how the brain makes decisions have revealed a different genre of evidence that will drive how the trier of fact will decide the case. Today an attorney taking a deposition …

Shocking Sentences, John B. Meixner Jr.

Scholarly Works

Harsh recidivist sentencing penalties, like three-strikes laws, have been criticized heavily among both academics and practitioners on a number of different grounds. Most arguments focus on how sentences arising from these penalties are disproportionate—that there is no sensible relationship between the wrong committed and the sentence imposed. Those critiques are valid, but there’s another important problem with recidivist sentencing penalties that has been overlooked: they lead to sentences that are totally unexpected—indeed, shocking—to the defendants who face them. Many recidivist sentencing penalties cause large leaps in sentencing exposure that amount to exponential growth when compared with a defendant’s prior sentences. …

Helpful Intentions? Impact Of Intentionality On Children's Memory For Forensically-Relevant Information, Ella P. Merriwether

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rationale: When a child is a witness or victim of a crime, they are often asked a barrage of questions regarding when the crime took place, how many times it occurred, and how the abuse unfolded (Cross & Whitcomb, 2017; Sullivan et al., 2022). These questions can be problematic because they rely on concepts for which children may lack memory or linguistic ability to answer (Fenson et al., 2000; Friedman, 1993). One fundamental element missing from the copious research (e.g., Brubacher et al., 2012; Stolzenberg et al., 2017a; Wylie et al., 2021) on children’s ability to recount forensically-relevant information is …

Brain Injury And Psychosocial Trauma: Outcomes Among Justice-Involved Individuals, Mahathi D. Kosuri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Justice-involved individuals experience disproportionately high rates of both traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and psychosocial traumas. However, these traumas have yet to be conceptualized together, leaving a chasm of research on how they interact and influence this population. The current study was the first to measure the effects of TBIs as well as psychosocial trauma among justice-involved men, within the context of executive functioning, history of justice involvement, and recidivism. A sample of men (N=95) from a private correctional facility were given the Ohio State University Traumatic Brain Injury Questionnaire (OSU-TBI-ID), the Lifetime Stressor Checklist- Revised (LSC-R), along with …

Guns, Analogies, And Constitutional Interpretation Across Centuries, Frederick Schauer, Barbara A. Spellman

Notre Dame Law Review

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court acknowledged the difficulties in applying its constitutional originalism to the question of firearms regulation. After all, the fully automatic assault rifles whose sale, possession, and use lie at the center of many contemporary debates about gun control and the Second Amendment simply did not exist in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Nor did they exist in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment, the vehicle for applying the Second Amendment to the states, was added to the Constitution. The firearms that existed in 1791 were largely …

Stigma Reduction And Resiliency Training For First Responders (Srrt-Fr): A Feasibility And Initial Efficacy Evaluation, Thalia P. Nicholson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

First responders, especially law enforcement, frequently encounter individuals experiencing substance use concerns. Previous research has documented that a greater understanding of substance use disorders promotes a decrease in stigmatizing perspectives. We present a novel approach to training law enforcement officers to improve their interactions with community members exhibiting substance use disorders, while also promoting their professional well-being. The present study sought to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the Stigma Reduction and Resiliency Training for First Responders (SRRT-FR) in a sample of law enforcement officers, as well as its efficacy in decreasing stigmatizing perspectives towards substance use disorders and increasing …

Even Laypeople Use Legalese, Eric H. Martinez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson

Faculty Scholarship

Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n=59 million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English.

Next, two pre-registered text generation experiments (n=286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws …

Human Trafficking Screening Tools Amongst Migrants And Refugees: Current Tools And Future Outlooks, Audra Fox

Student Theses

While various human trafficking screening tools exist to help stakeholders identify indicators and risk of trafficking, few tools are designed specifically for use amongst migrants and refugees. Via interviews with anti-trafficking stakeholders, the following qualitative study describes what tools stakeholders currently use to asses trafficking amongst migrants and refugee, and if stakeholders desire a new tool specific for migrant/refugee populations. Thematic results indicate that most stakeholders are not using validated tools for trafficking victims, let alone migrants and refugees (n=5, 38.5%). Of the total sample, 62% of participants (n=8) reported various screening discrepancies across stakeholders. Additionally, …