Biases in judgment and decision-making often arise at the level of first-order thoughts. If these initial thoughts are not overridden by second-order thoughts, they may lead to biased outputs. Current psychological models of legal actors assume that individuals are largely incapable of overcoming these first-order biasing thoughts and that these thoughts consequently lead to irrational and discriminatory behaviors. These models ignore considerable evidence that individuals often naturally engage in self-correction and that situational pressures often encourage self-correction. I discuss the conditions under which self-correction may occur and the possibilities and limits for the law in promoting self-correction to overcome biased judgments, decisions, and behavior.
Memory issues are well-known in legal trials that involve the reliability of eyewitnesses in criminal cases. However, the relevance of memory to law...
Evidence law controls what information will be admissible in court and when, how, and by whom it may be presented. It shapes not only the trial...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...
Professor Elizabeth Scott, the chief reporter of the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of Children and the Law, has often observed that the...
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced that the key to applying originalist methodology...
Forensic evidence has become a common tool in police investigations and a familiar form of evidence at trial. Forensic scientists are trained to...
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...
Scott Lilienfeld warned that psychology’s ideological uniformity would lead to premature closure on sensitive topics. He encouraged psychologists to...
We examined how the presentation of risk assessment results and the race of the person charged affected pretrial court actors’ recommendations to...
The lawyer-client relationship is pivotal in providing access to courts. This paper presents results from a large-scale field experiment exploring how...
Originalism is becoming the coin of the realm at the conservative Supreme Court. Even newly appointed liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has drawn...
Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two...
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that our Constitution...
This lecture critiques Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and assesses its implications for liberty and equality. Dobbs’ immediate effect...
The practice of assessing and adjudicating competence for criminal adjudication in the United States developed largely without assistance from the U.S...