Structured methods to assess violence risk have proliferated in recent years, but such methods are not uncontroversial. A “core controversy” concerns the extent to which an actuarial risk estimate derived at the group-level should — morally, logically, or mathematically — apply to any particular individual within the group. This study examines the related psychological question: when do people apply group-level risk estimates to the individual case? We manipulated whether an actuarial risk estimate is “unpacked;” that is, whether the risk factors on which the estimate is based are articulated. Our findings indicate that the degree of unpacking (e.g., listing 6 versus 3 risk factors) affected the likelihood that jury-eligible citizens will apply an actuarial risk estimate in their decision to civilly commit a particular respondent. Unpacking also increased the perceived relevance of the group-level risk estimate to the individual case. We then split the sample based on self-reported numeracy, defined as “ability with or knowledge of numbers.” Numeracy moderates the unpacking effect in that unpacking only made a difference for the innumerate participants. The psychological approach we take to the question of group-to-individual inference is not limited to violence risk assessment, and may apply to many other areas of law in which group-to-individual inferences are frequently if controversially made.
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...
This casebook aspires to help students understand and think systematically about the techniques of statutory interpretation. It blends exposition with...
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...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior...
Forensic evidence has become a common tool in police investigations and a familiar form of evidence at trial. Forensic scientists are trained to...
Scott Lilienfeld warned that psychology’s ideological uniformity would lead to premature closure on sensitive topics. He encouraged psychologists to...
A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former President Donald Trump on June 8, 2023, on multiple criminal charges related to classified documents...
We examined how the presentation of risk assessment results and the race of the person charged affected pretrial court actors’ recommendations to...
In our increasingly polarized society, claims that prosecutions are politically motivated, racially motivated, or just plain arbitrary are more common...
The lawyer-client relationship is pivotal in providing access to courts. This paper presents results from a large-scale field experiment exploring how...
Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two...
Perhaps the most surprising feature of the last Supreme Court term was the extraordinary public discourse on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. According to...
The practice of assessing and adjudicating competence for criminal adjudication in the United States developed largely without assistance from the U.S...