Law and Psychology Commons^™

Theorizing Mental Health Courts, E. Lea Johnston

UF Law Faculty Publications

To date, no scholarly article has analyzed the theoretical basis of mental health courts, which currently exist in forty-three states. This Article examines the two utilitarian justifications proposed by mental health court advocates—therapeutic jurisprudence and therapeutic rehabilitation—and finds both insufficient. Therapeutic jurisprudence is inadequate to justify mental health courts because of its inability, by definition, to resolve significant normative conflict. In essence, mental health courts express values fundamentally at odds with those underlying the traditional criminal justice system. Furthermore, the sufficiency of rehabilitation, as this concept appears to be defined by mental health court advocates, depends on the validity of …

Behaviorally Informed Regulation, Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir

Book Chapters

Policy makers typically approach human behavior from the perspective of the rational agent model, which relics on normativc, a priori analyses. The model assumes people make insightful, well-planned, highly controlled, and calculated decisions guided by considerations of personal utility. This perspective is promoted in the social sciences and in professional schools and has come to dominate much of the formulation and conduct of policy. An alternative view, developed mostly through empirical behavioral research, and the one we will articulate here, provides a substantially difierent perspective on individual behavior and its policy and regulatory implications. According to the empirical perspective, behavior …

Child Welfare Cases Involving Mental Illness: Reflections On The Role And Responsibilities Of The Lawyer-Guardian Ad Litem, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Child welfare cases involving mental illness suffered either by a child or his parent can be among the most difficult and perplexing that a child’s lawyerguardian ad litem (L-GAL) will handle. They may present daunting problems of accessing necessary and appropriate services as well as questions about whether and when such mental health problems can be resolved or how best to manage them. They also require the L-GAL to carefully consider crucially important questions—rarely with all the information one would like to have and too often with information that comes late in the case, is fragmented or glaringly incomplete. This …

Building Resilience In Foster Children: The Role Of The Child's Advocate, Frank E. Vandervort, James Henry, Mark A. Sloane

Articles

This Article provides an introduction to, and brief overview of trauma, its impact upon foster children, and steps children's advocates" can take to lessen or ameliorate the impact of trauma upon their clients. This Article begins in Part 11 by defining relevant terms. Part III addresses the prevalence of trauma among children entering the child welfare system. Part IV considers the neurodevelopmental (i.e., the developing brain) impact of trauma on children and will explore how that trauma may manifest emotionally and behaviorally. With this foundation in place, Part V discusses the need for a comprehensive trauma assessment including a thorough …

Judicial Mindsets: The Social Psychology Of Implicit Theories And The Law, Victor D. Quintanilla

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article introduces Dr. Carol Dweck’s seminal and significant line of psychological research on the phenomenon of implicit theories and draws on this research as a lens through which we might better understand judicial decision-making. In particular, the article focuses on the implications of two types of implicit theories – whether people believe that phenomena are static and fixed versus dynamic and malleable. By introducing this research, this article aims to forward a research agenda designed to examine how social, contextual, and situational forces influence judicial behavior.

An entity theory reflects the mindset that phenomena are fixed and unlikely to …

Juvenile Justice After Graham V. Florida: Keeping Due Process, Autonomy, And Paternalism In Balance, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal disputes involving children invariably evoke a complex matrix of issues such as child and adolescent capacity, individual rights and autonomy, parental authority, and in the criminal justice context-diminished culpability for a minor's actions. While it is difficult to identify a clear and cohesive jurisprudence regarding the balance between children's autonomy and children's vulnerability across Supreme Court cases, a series of cases over the last decade, including Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and J.D.B. v. North Carolina, offer a more consistent view of children as vulnerable, malleable, and in need of protection, at least in the …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

Book Review: International Human Rights And Mental Disability Law: When The Silenced Are Heard, Robert M. Sanger

Robert M. Sanger

26. “How Did You Feel?”: Increasing Child Sexual Abuse Witnesses’ Production Of Evaluative Information., Thomas D. Lyon, Nicholas Scurich, Karen Choi, Sally Handmaker, Rebecca Blank

Thomas D. Lyon

Ignatian Spirituality And The Life Of The Lawyer: Finding God In All Things – Even In The Ordinary Practice Of The Law, Gregory A. Kalscheur S.J.

Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J.

All of us know lawyers who seem unhappy, unfree, directionless, and dis-integrated, who seem to be following paths they haven’t consciously chosen, leading them to places they would never have chosen to go, seemingly locked in lives they haven’t freely chosen to live. Some would characterize this reality as a manifestation of a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning and value in the law, rooted in the difficulty lawyers have integrating the practice of the law into the whole of their lives. This article argues that the spirituality flowing from the life of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the …

Dangerous Psychopaths: Criminally Responsible But Not Morally Responsible, Subject To Criminal Punishment And To Preventive Detention, Ken Levy

San Diego Law Review

How should we judge psychopaths, both morally and in the criminal justice system? This Article will argue that psychopaths are often not morally responsible for their bad acts simply because they cannot understand, and therefore be guided by, moral reasons.

Scholars and lawyers who endorse the same conclusion automatically tend to infer from this premise that psychopaths should not be held criminally punishable for their criminal acts. These scholars and lawyers are making this assumption (that just criminal punishment requires moral responsibility) on the basis of one of two deeper assumptions: that either criminal punishment directly requires moral responsibility or …

Jurors' Ability To Judge The Reliability Of Confessions And Denials: Effects Of Camera Perspective During Interrogation, Lindsey Nicole Sweeney

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous research shows that some proportion of people interrogated confess, regardless of actual guilt. It has also been shown that the camera perspective from which an interrogation is videotaped influences later judgments of voluntariness and guilt, as well as sentencing recommendations. The present research extends the understanding of this phenomenon of false confessions and the camera perspective bias. Ecologically valid videotaped true/false confessions and denials were obtained in Experiment 1. The proportions of guilt participants and participants that confessed to cheating were found to be smaller in Experiment 1 than those in previous research. Participants in Experiment 2 viewed the …

Property's Morale, Nestor M. Davidson

Michigan Law Review

A foundational argument long invoked to justify stable property rights is that property law must protect settled expectations. Respect for expectations unites otherwise disparate strands of property theory focused on ex ante incentives, individual identity, and community. It also privileges resistance to legal transitions that transgress reliance interests. When changes in law unsettle expectations, such changes are thought to generate disincentives that Frank Michelman famously labeled "demoralization costs." Although rarely approached in these terms, arguments for legal certainty reflect underlying psychological assumptions about how people contemplate property rights when choosing whether and how to work, invest, create, bolster identity, join …

Can The Right To Personal Liberty Be Interpreted In A Paternalistic Manner? : Cases On The Mental Health Act 2001, Darius Whelan

Darius Whelan

Prisons Of The Mind: Social Value And Economic Inefficiency In The Criminal Justice Response To Mental Illness, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Amanda C Pustilnik

Can constructs of social meaning lead to actual criminal confinement? Can the intangible value ascribed to the maintenance of certain social norms lead to radically inefficient choices about resource allocation? The disproportionate criminal confinement of people with severe mental illnesses relative to non-mentally ill individuals suggests that social meanings related to mental illness can create legal and physical walls around this disfavored group. Responding to the non-violent mentally ill principally through the criminal system imposes at least 6 billion dollars in costs annually on the public, above any offsetting public safety and deterrence benefits, and imposes terrible human costs on …

A Look At In Re Fabian A.: Examining The Extension Of Due Process Protections And Failure To Object As Waiver In The Juvenile Justice System, Elizabeth Bannon

Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal

Vol. 11, No. 1

Coalition, Cross-Cultural Lawyering, And Intersectionality: Immigrant Identity As A Barrier To Effective Legal Counseling For Domestic Violence Victims, Jessica H. Stein

Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal

Vol. 11, No. 1

Unanswered Questions Of A Minority People In International Law: A Comparative Study Between Southern Cameroons & South Sudan, Bernard Sama Mr

Bernard Sama

The month July of 2011 marked the birth of another nation in the World. The distressful journey of a minority people under the watchful eyes of the international community finally paid off with a new nation called the South Sudan . As I watched the South Sudanese celebrate independence on 9 July 2011, I was filled with joy as though they have finally landed. On a promising note, I read the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon saying “[t]ogether, we welcome the Republic of South Sudan to the community of nations. Together, we affirm our commitment to helping it meet its …

Protecting Liberty And Autonomy: Desert/Disease Jurisprudence, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

This contribution to a symposium on the morality of preventive restriction on liberty begins by describing the positive law of preventive detention, which I term "desert/disease jurisprudence." Then it provides a brief excursus about risk prediction (estimation), which is at the heart of all preventive detention practices. Part IV considers whether proposed expansions of desert jurisprudence are consistent with retributive theories of justice, which ground desert jurisprudence. I conclude that this is a circle that cannot be squared. The following Part canvasses expansions of disease jurisprudence, especially the involuntary civil commitment of mentally abnormal, sexually violent predators, and the use …

25. Maltreated Children’S Ability To Estimate Temporal Location And Numerosity Of Placement Changes And Court Visits., Lindsay Wandrey, Thomas D. Lyon, Jodi A. Quas, William J. Friedman

Thomas D. Lyon