Law and Psychology Commons^™

May It Please The Court?: The Perils Of Correcting A Justice's Pronunciation, James J. Duane

Seton Hall Circuit Review

No abstract provided.

Parental Blame Frame: An Empirical Examination Of The Media's Portrayal Of Parents And Their Delinquent Juveniles, Ashley Wellman, Eve Brank, Katherine Hazen

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

The most recent study discussed in this article examines how the media report issues of parental responsibility and blame regarding acts of juvenile delinquency. To accomplish this goal, we examined the frequency, context, and framing of parental responsibility in local and national print media via two content analyses. The results demonstrate that national media sources depict the notion of parental responsibility, whereas local media stories rarely mention parents. The national stories offer distant, more global statements of parental responsibility, while the local, specific stories tend to avoid any parental blame. The findings in this paper mirror public opinion polls that …

Employment Discrimination And The Domino Effect, Laura T. Kessler

Florida State University Law Review

Employment discrimination is a multidimensional problem. In many instances, some combination of employer bias, the organization of work, and employees’ responses to these conditions, leads to worker inequality. Title VII does not sufficiently account for these dynamics in two significant respects. First, Title VII’s major proof structures divide employment discrimination into discrete categories, for example, disparate treatment, disparate impact, and sexual harassment. This compartmentalization does not account for the fact that protected employees often concurrently experience more than one form of discriminatory exclusion. The various types of exclusion often add up to significant inequalities, even though seemingly insignificant when considered …

Law And Identifiability, Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, Ilana Ritov, Tehila Kogut

Indiana Law Journal

Psychological studies have shown that people react either more generously or more punitively toward identified individuals than toward unidentified ones. This phenomenon, named the identifiability effect, has received little attention in the legal literature, despite its importance for the law. As a prime example, while legislators typically craft rules that would apply to unidentified people, judges ordinarily deal with identified individuals. The identifiability effect suggests that the outcomes of these two forms of lawmaking may differ, even when they pertain to similar facts and situations.

This Article is a preliminary investigation into the relevance of the identifiability effect for law …

Digging Into The Foundations Of Evidence Law, David H. Kaye

Michigan Law Review

Review of The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law by Michael J. Saks and Barbara A. Spellman.

Reducing The Dangers Of Future Dangerousness Testimony: Applying The Federal Rules Of Evidence To Capital Sentencing, Jaymes Fairfax-Columbo, David Dematteo

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The United States Supreme Court has long held that the death penalty cannot be imposed arbitrarily, and that during sentencing in capital cases, jurors must be provided with guidelines to assist them in narrowing down the class of individuals for whom the death penalty is appropriate. Typically, this is accomplished through the presentation of aggravating and mitigating evidence. One aggravating factor is a capital offender’s future dangerousness, or the likelihood that the individual will engage in violent institutional misconduct while in prison. Future dangerousness may be assessed using a variety of measures; Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a measure of personality …

The Resilience Of Noxious Doctrine: The 2016 Election, The Marketplace Of Ideas, And The Obstinacy Of Bias, Leonard M. Niehoff, Deeva Shah

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Supreme Court has recognized the central role that free expression plays in our democratic enterprise. In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Abrams, Justice Holmes offered a theory of how free expression advances our search for truth and our cultivation of an informed electorate. That model—often called the “marketplace of ideas,” based upon the metaphor used by Holmes—has proven to be one of the most persistent and influential concepts in First Amendment jurisprudence.

The marketplace of ideas model essentially holds that free expression serves our democratic goals by allowing differing proposed truths and versions of the facts …

Factors Affecting Mental Health Seeking Behaviors Of Law Enforcement Officers, Vincent M. Haecker

Dissertations

The intent of this study was to elicit perspectives from law enforcement counselors, clinicians, chaplains, and peer group leaders for factors affecting law enforcement officer’s (LEOs) seeking mental health assistance. The law enforcement and mental health communities have gone to great lengths to ensure assistance is available to LEOs in an effort to counter the stress and trauma associated with the policing profession. Past studies attempted to elicit LEOs attitudes on mental health services, generating mixed results and were unable to establish why available services were underutilized. This study employed a qualitative methodology to elicit perspectives on this phenomena from …

Recurrent Flooding And Social Vulnerability: A Model Ordinance, Sarah Edwards

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Applying Motivational Interviewing To Parenting Act Mediation: The Promise Of The Process., Kristen M. Blankley, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Kathryn Speck

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a research-based method of helping people engage in behavior change. MI tools and strategies have been used successfully to help people tackle drug and alcohol addiction, weight loss, and other unhealthy behaviors. MI methods aim to uncover and support a person's desire to change while simultaneously respecting an individual's autonomy. Historically, Ml has been employed in support settings, such as counselors working with clients. In Nebraska, probation officers now employ MI practices to help encourage positive changes while still maintaining accountability if people choose not to follow the terms of their probation.

Mediation is all about …

Ideology, Race, And The Death Penalty: "Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics" In Advocacy Research, Anthony Walsh, Virginia Hatch

Journal of Ideology

We use the literature on race in death penalty to illustrate the hold that ideology has on researchers and journalists alike when a social issue is charged with emotional content. We note particularly how statistical evidence become misinterpreted in ways that support a particular ideology, either because of innumeracy or because—subconsciously or otherwise—one’s ideology precludes a critical analysis. We note that because white defendants are now proportionately more likely to receive the death penalty and to be executed than black defendants that the argument has shifted from a defendant-based to a victim-based one. We examine studies based on identical data …

Enemy Construction And The Press, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Lisa Grow Sun

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

When the president of the United States declared recently that the press is “the enemy,” it set off a firestorm of criticism from defenders of the institutional media and champions of the press’s role in the democracy. But even these Trump critics have mostly failed to appreciate the wider ramifications of the president’s narrative choice. Our earlier work describes the process of governmental “enemy construction,” by which officials use war rhetoric and other signaling behaviors to convey that a person or institution is not merely an institution that, although wholly legitimate, has engaged in behaviors that are disappointing or disapproved, …

Moral Disengagement In Legal Judgments, Tess M. S. Neal, Robert J. Cramer

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally-relevant judgment in this theoretically-driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social-cognitive phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic psychologists' willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral disengagement would function as mediator of participants' existing attitudes and their judgmentsa theoretical bridge between attitudes and judgmentswas …

Time Is Money: An Empirical Assessment Of Non-Economic Damages Arguments, John Campbell, Bernard Chao, Christopher Robertson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Non-economic damages (pain and suffering) are the most significant and variable components of liability. Our survey of fifty-one U.S. jurisdictions shows wide heterogeneity in whether attorneys may quantify damages as time-units of suffering (per diem) or demand a specific amount (lump sum). Either sort of large number could exploit an irrational anchoring effect. We performed a realistic, online, video-based experiment with 732 human subjects. We replicated prior work showing that large lump sum demands drive larger jury verdicts, but surprisingly found no effect of similarly-sized per diem anchors. We did find per diem effects on binary liability outcomes, and thus …

Abductive Reasoning In Wto Law, Chios Carmody

Law Publications

Law is about many things, but at base it is about rights and obligations. That jural correlation is established and sustained by means of reasoning. We hold that an actor has a right or obligation by virtue of reasoning that classically occurs in one of two forms. An obligation creates a right by means of inductive logic that rests on the conviction of similar instances in the past and the need for proof. It can also create an obligation by means of deductive logic, that is, the process of reasoning from one or more statements (premises) that are used to …

The Divide "Public Airwaves Through Prison Walls" Proof Document, Sally Brown

Promotion

Proof document for promotional ad for the Nov. 15, 2017 presentation of "Public Airwaves Through Prison Walls" in conjunction with the exhibit "The Divide" in the WVU Downtown Campus Library.

Penal Incapacitation: A Situationist Critique, Guyora Binder, Ben Notterman

Journal Articles

Incapacitation of offenders has been an influential goal of criminal justice policy during the era of mass incarceration. The Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence has accepted incapacitation alone as a justifying purpose for recidivist sentencing enhancements. Yet recent Eighth Amendment decisions have required that severe sentences of incarceration be justified by reference to all purposes of punishment cumulatively, and have tested claims of incapacitative benefits against empirical evidence. This Article critiques penal incapacitation as both theoretically and empirically flawed. Incapacitation theory underestimates situational factors contributing to crime, over-attributes dangerousness to individuals, and fails to account for crime committed in prison. …

Personal Reality: Delusion In Law And Science, Joshua C. Tate

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The concept of an insane delusion appears in several branches of the law, including contracts, gifts, and wills. Critics of the traditional doctrine have made compelling arguments in favor of its modification or abolition in the context of wills, given that it is often used as an excuse to substitute the values of jurors for those of the testator. Moreover, recent scientific studies have shown correlations between delusions and other cognitive impairments, calling into question the need for an independent doctrine of insane delusion. Nevertheless, there is evidence that not all deluded individuals have additional cognitive biases, and those who …

Is Miranda Good News Or Bad News For The Police: The Usefulness Of Empirical Evidence, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona created a culture in which police officers regularly warn arrestees that they have a right to remain silent, that anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law, that they have the right to an attorney, and that if they cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed to them. These Miranda warnings have a number of possible effects. The warnings are meant to inform suspects about negative consequences associated with speaking to the police without the assistance of counsel. In this sense they …

Actus Reus, Mens Rea, And Brain Science: What Do Volition And Intent Really Mean?, Erica Beecher-Monas, Edgar Garcia-Rill

Kentucky Law Journal

The foundational elements of criminal law, actus reus and mens rea, are vague, imprecise, and indeterminate categories that are based on outdated notions about human behavior. These confused categories affect not only what legally constitutes choice, volition, and intent, but also the defendant's ability to present evidence (since the categories define the evidence that will be admissible), and ultimately, criminal liability. In this Article we explain how neuroscience allows us to reconsider these legal concepts and conceive a more informed view of human behavior (and therefore criminal liabilty). The Article explains how distortions in brain function affect the way …