Law and Psychology Commons^™

Taking Laughter Seriously At The Supreme Court, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Laughter in Supreme Court oral arguments has been misunderstood, treated as either a lighthearted distraction from the Court’s serious work, or interpreted as an equalizing force in an otherwise hierarchical environment. Examining the more than nine thousand instances of laughter witnessed at the Court since 1955, this Article shows that the Justices of the Supreme Court use courtroom humor as a tool of advocacy and a signal of their power and status. As the Justices have taken on a greater advocacy role in the modern era, they have also provoked more laughter.

The performative nature of courtroom humor is apparent …

Exploring Locus Of Control In Offender Cognition And Recidivism Paradigms, Anistasha Lightning, Danielle Polage

All Master's Theses

Working with four Washington State county jails to administer surveys to currently incarcerated inmates, we investigated locus of control and beliefs in the likelihood of continued legal involvement as possible antecedents to criminal recidivism. The surveys examined whether there was any connection between legal involvement frequency and the externalization of locus of control. We investigated external locus of control with specific respect to involvement with the law, the prospect of future incarceration, and feelings concerning the overall cause of original and/or sustained legal involvement utilizing the Revised Causal Dimension Scale (McAuley, Duncan, & Russell, 1992). We identified statistically significant interactions …

Canines At The Company, Felines At The Factory: The Risks And Rewards Of Incorporating Service Animals And Companion Animals Into The Workplace, Rebecca J. Huss

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

With unemployment rates at historically low levels, the ability of an employer to attract and retain productive employees is key to a company’s success. Simultaneously, the percentage of persons in the United States with disabilities is increasing. Additionally, many persons without disabilities consider allowing companion animals at work a valuable employee benefit. This Article focuses on the legal and workplace implications of incorporating service animals and companion animals at work.

This Article begins by analyzing when an employer must accommodate a request by an employee with a disability to be accompanied by a service animal at work under the Americans …

Contractual Incapacity And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Sean M. Scott

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The doctrine of contractual incapacity allows people with mental disabilities to avoid their contractual liability. Its underlying premise is that the law has an obligation to protect people with such disabilities both from themselves and from unscrupulous people who would take advantage of them; mental incapacity provides this protection by rendering certain contracts unenforceable. The Disability Rights Movement (“DRM”), however, has challenged such protective legal doctrines, as they rest on outmoded concepts about people with mental disabilities.

This essay argues that the mental incapacity doctrine undermines the goals of the DRM and the legislative goals of the Americans with Disabilities …

The Anonymity Heuristic: How Surnames Stop Identifying People When They Become Trademarks, Russell W. Jacobs

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article explores the following question central to trademark law: if a homograph has both a surname and a trademark interpretation will consumers consider those interpretations as intrinsically overlapping or the surname and trademark as completely separate and unrelated words? While trademark jurisprudence typically has approached this question from a legal perspective or with assumptions about consumer behavior, this Article builds on the Law and Behavioral Science approach to legal scholarship by drawing from the fields of psychology, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

The Article concludes that consumers will regard the two interpretations as separate and unrelated, processing surname …

Mediator Burnout, Lydia Nussbaum

Scholarly Works

Being a mediator is hard work Mediators must make meaningful connections with individuals without over-stepping bounds of impartiality, manage emotions without becoming emotionally invested, and empower decision-making without undermining self-determination. Decades of research into occupational stress, also known as "burnout," indicates that mediators not only are susceptible to burnout, but also that the symptoms of burnout undermine fundamental principles of quality mediation. For example, a burned-out mediator may exhibit narrow and uncreative thinking, diminished capacity to regulate emotions, compromised decision-making, and deficits in attention and memory.

The prospect of mediator burnout not only threatens the quality of mediation, but it …

Considering Parental Alienation When Assessing Best Interest Of The Child, Juno Adler

CMC Senior Theses

As the divorce rate in the United States remains steady at 50%, the last few decades have shown an increase in child custody disputes. Within these litigations, interparental conflict can reach high levels and incite behaviors that wreak havoc on the children who are caught in the middle. When considering custody arrangements, judges and other evaluators use the Best Interest of the Child Standard (BICS), a jurisdictionally-specific framework that examines several factors that contribute to a child’s health and well-being. Parents who allow their resentments to get the better of them sometimes engage in behavior that encourages their child to …

(Un)Conscious Judging, Elizabeth Thornburg

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Fact inferences made by the trial judge are the lynchpin of civil litigation. If inferences were a matter of universally held logical deductions, this would not be troubling. Inferences, however, are deeply contestable conclusions that vary from judge to judge. Non-conscious psychological phenomena can lead to flawed reasoning, implicit bias, and culturally influenced perceptions. Inferences differ significantly, and they matter. Given the homogeneous makeup of the judiciary, this is a significant concern.

This Article will demonstrate the ubiquity, importance, and variability of inferences by examining actual cases in which trial and appellate (or majority and dissenting) judges draw quite different …

Sentencing Length Disparities: Assessing Why Race And Gender Influence Judges’ Decisions, Janna Akers

Scripps Senior Theses

The purpose of this study is to assess why the race and gender of defendants influence judges’ decisions using the focal concern theory. This study will require around 84 participants. Participants will be federal judges who will be recruited via email. In an online survey, participants will be randomly assigned to one of four conditions . Participants will all read a vignette which an individual was convicted for in trafficking of Xanax. The vignette will be manipulated by the name and accompanying a mugshot based on the race (Black/White) and gender (male/female) of the defendant. The expected result is that …

Love, Anger, And Social Change, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

Emotions matter to social movement activists—including social movement lawyers. Emotions motivate activism and emotions sustain the long hard work of social change. Movement activists and lawyers know that from their own lived experiences. Further, when we listen to movement activists talk about their work, we hear them speak commonly about two emotions in particular—love and anger. To be a social movement activist (whether lawyer or non-lawyer) means to have passion about one’s cause, and to have a fire in the belly to keep going despite setbacks and slow progress. We hear activists and movement lawyers talk about how the love …

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Mindfulness involves paying attention with curiosity in an intentional, open, and compassionate way to life as it unfolds moment to moment. Law students, lawyers, law professors, legal clients, and indeed all people can improve their lives through mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to individual benefits and personal transformation. Mindfulness can also lead to societal benefits and social change. This invited symposium contribution exemplifies how mindfulness can facilitate the positive personal and professional development of law students by presenting excerpts of law students' answers discussing mindfulness to questions from the final examination of the course: Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Notably, none of …

The Marginalization Of Black Aspiring Lawyers, Aaron N. Taylor

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Nudges That Should Fail?, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Professor Sunstein (2017) discusses possible causes for and policy implications of the failure of nudges, with a special attention to defaults. Though he focuses on nudges that fail when they should succeed, Sunstein recognizes that some failures reveal that a nudge should not have been attempted to begin with. Nudges that fail, however, does not consider fully the relationship between the outcomes of nudging and their likely welfare effects, most notably neglecting the troubling case of nudges that succeed when they should fail. Hence, after clarifying the boundaries of legitimate nudging and noting the fourfold relationship between the efficacy of …

Temptation's Page Flies Out The Door: Navigating Complex Systems Of Disability And The Law From A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Perspective, Michael L. Perlin, Mehgan Gallagher

Articles & Chapters

This article considers the difficulties inherent in the navigation of the legal system and the disability system, difficulties made more complicated when these systems intersect. Although this problem is not a new one, remarkably, it has never been the subject of any legal scholarship. We argue here that it is futile to consider either system to be a uniform one, and that to make any sense of the underlying ambiguities, it is necessary to consider both the potential conflicts both between domestic and international law (using fitness to proceed to trial as a case example), and the conflicts between social …

There's Voices In The Night Trying To Be Heard: The Potential Impact Of The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities On Domestic Mental Disability Law, Michael L. Perlin, Naomi Weinstein

Articles & Chapters

This paper carefully examines, through a therapeutic jurisprudence framework, the likely impact of the ratification of this UN Convention on society’s sanist attitudes towards persons with mental disabilities. We argue that it is impossible to consider the impact of anti-discrimination law on persons with mental disabilities without a full understanding of how sanism -- an irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry -- permeates all aspects of the legal system and the entire fabric of American society.

Notwithstanding nearly …

A World Of Steel-Eyed Death: An Empirical Evaluation Of The Failure Of The Strickland Standard To Ensure Adequate Counsel To Defendants With Mental Disabilities Facing The Death Penalty, Michael L. Perlin, Talia Roitberg Harmon, Sarah Chatt

Articles & Chapters

Anyone who has been involved with death penalty litigation in the past four decades knows that one of the most scandalous aspects of that process—in many ways, the most scandalous—is the inadequacy of counsel so often provided to defendants facing execution. By now, virtually anyone with even a passing interest is well versed in the cases and stories about sleeping lawyers, missed deadlines, alcoholic and disoriented lawyers, and, more globally, lawyers who simply failed to vigorously defend their clients. This is not news.

And, in the same vein, anyone who has been so involved with this area of law and …

A Tj Approach To Mental Disability Rights Research: On Sexual Autonomy And Sexual Offending, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Alison Lynch

Articles & Chapters

We believe it is impossible to understand the development and the power of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) without acknowledging that its roots in mental disability law have continued to expand and flourish over the decades, and that there is no other substantive area of the law in which every aspect – substantive and procedural, civil and criminal, statutory and constitutional. domestic and international – has been weighed and evaluated using a TJ lens. In this chapter, we consider how those roots have shaped the last three decades of research and the implications of what has developed. We look carefully at two …

Shielding The Youth: Implementing Mindful Meditation In Public Schools To Reduce The Rising Rates Of Suicide And Depression Amongst Children, Teens And Young Adults, Keaton Maurer

Valparaiso University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Some Things Are Too Hot To Touch: Competency, The Right To Sexual Autonomy, And The Roles Of Lawyers And Expert Witnesses, Michael L. Perlin, Alison Lynch, Valerie R. Mcclain

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Introducing An Interdisciplinary Frontier To Judging, Emotion And Emotion Work, Terry A. Maroney, Stina B. Blix, Kathy Mack, Sharyn R. Anleu

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This special issue of Oñati Socio-Legal Series, titled Judging, Emotion and Emotion Work, is the result of presentations and discussions during an interdisciplinary workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) held in May 2018. This issue builds on the growing critique of the dispassionate ideal of judicial work, combining original theoretical insights with imaginative empirical analyses to extend the understanding of emotion in judging. Fifteen articles are presented in four themes: Theoretical, cultural and historical perspectives; Tensions of the dispassionate ideal; Social dynamics of emotion in judging; and Research methods, empirical insights and [changing] judicial practice. …