Law and Psychology Commons^™

Guardianship For Persons With Mental Illness - A Legal And Appropriate Alternative?, Leslie Salzman

Articles

The article critiques the U.S. guardianship system for individuals with psychosocial disabilities, arguing that it often unnecessarily restricts their autonomy by removing their legal right to make decisions. It advocates for supported decision-making models as a less restrictive alternative, aligning with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The analysis emphasizes the importance of maximizing integration and participation in social, economic, and civic life, while highlighting the need for safeguards to ensure effective support without undue bureaucratic complexity.

Capital Punishment, Psychiatrists And The Potential Bottleneck Of Competence , Jacob M. Appel

Journal of Law and Health

The purpose of this paper is to merge two largely separate bodies of writing on the subject of psychiatric participation in capital punishment. Much has already been written from the perspective of legal academics regarding the rights of prisoners to be free from unwanted medical care if the purpose of providing such care is to render them fit for execution. Medical ethicists have also written much on the degree to which physicians, and specifically psychiatrists, may participate in facilitating the death penalty before they become so complicit as to violate accepted standards of professional ethics. Surprisingly, these two fields of …

Economics, Behavioral Biology, And Law, Owen D. Jones, Erin O'Hara O'Connor, Jeffrey Evans Stake

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The article first compares economics and behavioral biology, examining the assumptions, core concepts, methodological tenets, and emphases of the two fields. Building on this, the article then compares the applied interdisciplinary fields of law and economics, on one hand, with law and behavioral biology, on the other - highlighting not only the most important similarities, but also the most important differences.

The article subsequently explores ways that biological perspectives on human behavior may prove useful, by improving economic models and the behavioral insights they generate. The article concludes that although there are important differences between the two fields, the overlaps …

The Principle Of Subsidiarity Applied: Reforming The Legal Framework To Capture The Psychological Abuse Of Children, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Psychological abuse is the most prevalent type of child abuse. It lies at the core of child maltreatment because it is embedded in and interacts with physical and sexual abuse, as well as physical neglect. It also has a more extensive and destructive impact on the development of children than any other type of abuse. Yet, the current child protection system fails to adequately address the problem because the normative framework of the child protection system does not always include the psychological abuse of children. For the majority of states, the physical health, safety, and well-being of children are focal …

Book Review Of Michelle Oberman’S And Cheryl L. Meyer’S “When Mothers Kill: Interviews From Prison”, Michael L. Perlin

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Torture In The Eyes Of The Beholder, Mary-Hunter M. Mcdonnell, Loran F. Nordgren, George Loewenstein

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article draws upon recent social psychological research to demonstrate the psychological difficulty of distinguishing between torture and enhanced interrogation. We critique the accuracy of evaluations made under the current torture standard using two constructs--reliability and validity--that are employed in the social sciences to assess the quality of a construct or metric. We argue that evaluations of interrogation tactics using the current standard are both unreliable and invalid. We first argue that the torture standard is unreliable because of the marked variation in the manner in which different jurisdictions interpret and employ it. Next, we draw on recent social psychological …

Abandoned Love: The Impact Of Wyatt V. Stickney On The Intersection Between International Human Rights And Domestic Mental Disability Law, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Wyatt v. Stickney - the first case to find (40 years ago) a constitutional right to treatment for persons institutionalized because of mental disability - is the most important institutional rights case litigated in the history of domestic mental disability law. It spawned “copycat” litigation in multiple federal district courts and state superior courts, led directly to the creation of “Patients’ Bills of Rights” in most states, and inspired the creation of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act, the Mental Health Systems Act Bill of Rights, and the federally-funded Protection and Advocacy System. Its direct influence on …

Online, Distance Legal Education As An Agent Of Social Change, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

New York Law School (NYLS) created its online, distance learning mental disability law program in an effort to provide education in an area of the law that remains hidden in most law school curricula. Since 2000, it has offered its mental disability law courses in an online, distance learning format to its own students, to law students from other US-based law schools, to mental health professionals, to students in all the allied mental health professions and in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, and to activists and advocates (including members of the psychiatric survivor movement). It has offered the …

Considering Pathological Altruism In The Law From Therapeutic Jurisprudence And Neuroscience Perspectives, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Beyond Common Sense: A Social Psychological Study Of Iqbal's Effect On Claims Of Race Discrimination, Victor D. Quintanilla

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009) from a social psychological perspective, and empirically studies Iqbal’s effect on claims of race discrimination.

In Twombly and then Iqbal, the Court recast Rule 8 from a notice-based rule into a plausibility standard. Under Iqbal, federal judges must evaluate whether each complaint contains sufficient factual matter “to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” When doing so, Iqbal requires judges to draw on their “judicial experience and common sense.” Courts apply Iqbal at the pleading stage, before evidence has been …

The Behavioral Economics Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The world of mergers and acquisitions seems like a setting in which rationality necessarily dominates. There are high stakes, focused and sustained attention, and expert advisers who are repeat players. In the economics and management literature, however, there has been a great deal of research on what might be called “behavioral M&A”—using insights from psychology to explain observed patterns of behavior in the acquisitions marketplace. To date, the law has largely been uninterested in the psychological dynamics of corporate acquisitions. This essay looks at recent research on such issues as the role of overconfidence, hubris, anchoring, etc. in explaining buy-side …

Excluding Unemployed Workers From Job Opportunities: Why Disparate Impact Protections Still Matter, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Need To Overrule Mapp V. Ohio, William T. Pizzi

Publications

This Article argues that it is time to overrule Mapp v. Ohio. It contends that the exclusionary rule is outdated because a tough deterrent sanction is difficult to reconcile with a criminal justice system where victims are increasingly seen to have a stake in criminal cases. The rule is also increasingly outdated in its epistemological assumption which insists officers act on "reasons" that they can articulate and which disparages actions based on "hunches" or "feelings." This assumption runs counter to a large body of neuroscience research suggesting that humans often "feel" or "sense" danger, sometimes even at a subconscious …

Smart-Grid: Technology And The Psychology Of Environmental Behavior Change, Stephanie M. Stern

Chicago-Kent Law Review

There is a schism in the legal scholarship between scholars who argue that value, norm, and information campaigns can induce pro-environmental behavior and those who contend that structural, psychological, and social forces sharply constrain behavior change. Both sides of this debate have neglected the critical and ever-increasing role of technology in addressing residential pollution. The example of electricity "smart grids" illustrates how technology engineered to override cognitive and behavioral limitations can comprehensively reduce household consumption and emissions. Electricity conservation suffers from multiple barriers to collective action, including large numbers of geographically dispersed polluters, low financial payoffs, and, the contribution of …

The Life Of An Unknown Assassin: Leon Czolgosz And The Death Of William Mckinley, Cary H. Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The purpose of this essay is to examine the discourses that surrounded the life of Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley. The gaps in Czolgosz’s life, his peculiar silences, his poor health and the ambiguity and thinness of his confession, rather than taken as instances of mental and physical distress, have, instead, been understood as signs of a revolutionary anarchistic assassin. Czolgosz is an expression of a cultural tradition in somatic form. I argue that the discursive construction of criminality, already present in the late nineteenth century within the medical and human sciences, is what shaped Czolgosz’s life …

"We Shall Not Cease From Exploration": Narratives From The Hyde Inquiry About Mental Health And Criminal Justice, Anne Derrick

Dalhousie Law Journal

When I embarked on my journey at the Hyde Inquiry I really felt I knew nothing. The place I came to know for the first time, at the end, was a place I had really not known before. I was taken there by the narratives that made up the threads of the Inquiry and it is some of these narratives I am going to discuss here.

Medicine And The Law: The Challenges Of Mental Illness, Beverley Mclachlin

Dalhousie Law Journal

In this lecture, I offer some thoughts on a medical/legal issue that is old, yet perennially pertinent; that is common, yet extraordinary; that is wellknown, yet all too often swept under the carpet. I refer to the issue-or more accurately the plethora of issues-that surround mental health and the law.

Law And Mental Health: A Relationship In Crisis?, Sheila Wildeman

Dalhousie Law Journal

What is the significance of the rule of law to the area of professional knowledge and practice that is "mental health"-or to the interaction of those two aspirational, one might say euphemistically-named social systems: the mental health and justice systems? This question centres upon the rule of law-specifically, I suggest (as I relate further in closing), a thick conception of the rule of law grounded in an ideal of state-subject reciprocity-and not, or not directly, upon the individual and social good ofhealth. It is this overarching question that I wish to pursue in setting the stage for the two lectures …

Venus In Furs: Why False Confessions Are True, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the nature of truth and false confessions in the context of confession and interrogation.

The Use Of The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Ii (Mmpi-2) In Pre-Employment Evaluations, Ana M. Gamez

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Psychological testing is an important facet in the selection and hiring processes of law enforcement and public safety personnel. Research in this area suggests that the MMPI-2 scales have been correlated with problematic behavior among police officers, poor job performance, and officer misconduct. This study examined the extent to which suitability for hire could be predicted by the MMPI-2 scale L (Lie), scale K (correction), Infrequency scale (F), scale 4 Psychopathic Deviate (Pd), scale 6 Paranoia (Pa), scale 7 Psychasthenia (Pt), and scale 9 Hypomania (Ma). It examined whether profile differences emerged as a function of suitability across gender, between …