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The article discusses implications of sackling defendents in bench. Topics include The U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of shackles in a courtroom, without due cause, is unduly prejudicial to defendants, as juries are influenced by the sight of an individual being led into the courtroom in chains; and it explains crucial to understanding how implicit judicial bias manifests in legal proceedings.

Socio-psychological research solidly shows that people hold implicit biases against short individuals. We associate a host of positive qualities to those with above average height, and we belittle those born a few inches short. These implicit biases, in turn, lead to outright discrimination. Experiments prove that employers prefer not to hire or promote short employees and that they do not adequately compensate them. According to various studies, controlling for other variables, every inch of height is worth hundreds of dollars in annual income, which is no less severe than the wage gap associated with gender or racial discrimination. Given the proportions of height discrimination revealed in this Article, I examine why it is not legally addressed. How come the federal system and most states do not view height discrimination as illegal, and why are such discriminatory practices ignored even by their victims? Using psychological literature, I argue that the answer lies in the "naming" of this phenomenon. We fail to recognize height discrimination because it does not fit our mental template of discrimination. The characteristics we usually associate with discrimination--intentional behavior, clear harm, specific perpetrator/victim, and specific domain--do not exist in height discrimination, so we fail to categorize it as such. This Article explains why, despite the "naming" difficulties, the legal system should not ignore the widespread heightism phenomenon. Based on the psychological literature, it suggests ways to deal with it, focusing on the provision of information and on consciousness raising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the time of writing this article, the global arbitration community eagerly awaits as the United Kingdom Supreme Court hears arguments in its first ever case on an arbitrator challenge. Concerns regarding transparency and fairness in the arbitral process have brought the issues of independence and impartiality into renewed focus. Recent years have seen a greater push towards regulating conflicts of interest that arise from the connections of arbitrators. In 2015, towards the end of bringing the Indian regime on par with global standards, the IBA Guidelines on Conflict of Interest in International Arbitration were introduced into the Indian Arbitration and Conciliation Act of 1996, the only instance of such adoption in national law. The IBA Guidelines are a soft law instrument designed to help evaluate commonly arising connections that give rise to bias concerns. The Guidelines have certainly met their stated objective of introducing more stringent independence requirements in India, particularly in the case of state employees. At the same time, concerns remain as to whether the bright-line approach of the Guidelines is the best way to address a number of scenarios. This paper seeks to assess the suitability of the Guidelines in light of practices in other jurisdictions. By acknowledging a divergence in approaches to conflicts of interest, it can inform current discourse on developing binding norms for arbitrator independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Christiano argues that democracies acquire a right to rule by being the unique embodiment of publicly accessible rules. Justice requires the equal advancement of the interests of all (the equality requirement). However, due to the need for citizens to shape a common world despite disagreement and limitations of human cognition, publicity is a necessary constraint on the pursuit of justice (the publicity constraint). Given that democracy is necessary to secure public equality, democratic authority is thus justified, as democracy is the only political arrangement that satisfies both the publicity constraint and equality requirement. Christiano's argument depends on a claim that individuals should be given the right to advance what they take to be their interests. This right is defended through two interlocking claims. First, according individuals this right advances three fundamental interests: i) correcting cognitive biases; ii) being at home in the world; and iii) equal moral standing. Second, the three fundamental interests imply that any collective decision-making procedure must be publicly accessible. Thus, any argument against the right to judge for oneself either violates the publicity requirement or the equality constraint. In this paper, I argue that Christiano's argument faces a problem—under a two-stage plural voting system, an unequal distribution of voting rights can satisfy both the publicity requirement and the equality constraint. Thus, Christiano's claim that public equality requires an equal distribution of the right to judge for oneself is mistaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses mergers and acquisitions (M&A) issues like executive bias, management accountability, and identity of corporate executives. Topics include the roles and functions of senior directors and management in M&A deals, the role of legal and financial advisors in said transactions, as well as the effects of bias and identity literature on officer accountability under the law.

In the article, the author discusses the need to reduce the use of judicial power to create laws for the benefits of landlords, employers, and the Conservative Party in Great Britain. Topics include the alleged move by the Court of Appeal in the 1950s to reject the real property law dogma to create loophole to the Rents Act, the need to prevent the use of judicial office in politics, and the sources of law in the 17th-20th centuries.

Prosecutors are joining the big data revolution, adopting "intelligence-driven" strategies to target crime patterns. Structured and unstructured datasets are collecting information to track offenders, places, and groups, allowing prosecutors to link crimes by time, location, associations, or other connections. But as powerful as these new forms of centralized data systems might be for investigators, there remains a critical open issue: the systems were not designed to identify the exculpatory and impeaching material prosecutors are required to disclose under Brady v. Maryland. This Article examines the design flaw at the core of the intelligence-driven prosecution model--a flaw that creates a due process problem that threatens to undermine this innovation. The Article also explores how big data prosecution necessitates a new theory of Brady and suggests a way to engineer a theoretical and technological solution to current Brady practice consistent with due process principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Jennifer Walker Elrod, Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, delivered at Justice Ruby Kless Sondock Lectureship in Legal Ethics Jurist-In-Residence program at the University of Houston Law Center on February 19, 2019. Topics of the speech include development of artificial intelligence in courtroom, judiciary change with the incorporation of predictive models and bias and discretion in judicial decision-making.

The English Romeo and Juliet tradition is seldom read in a political light. This essay reconsiders the political status of the story's first English adaptation by Arthur Brooke (which Shakespeare would later borrow heavily from) by reading it against a large dataset of 1562 printed texts. I contend that we should read this poem politically because that is what its readers, including Shakespeare, would almost certainly have done. Arguing against dominant scholarly assumptions of the poem and author's anti-Catholic bias, I explain how The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet resists religious persecution, instead emphasising tolerance and inclusivity across religious and political divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper empirically assesses evidence of bias among bankruptcy judges and predictability of judicial decision making in Serbia. For this purpose, we devised three hypothetical cases that were distributed to judges that preside over bankruptcy cases in Serbia. While the results do not indicate a consistent bias towards either the debtor or the creditor, they show concerning unpredictability of judicial decision making, hence leading to a high level of legal insecurity. Based on responses we observed high heterogeneity among Serbian bankruptcy judges in their interpretation of the bankruptcy laws. This makes allocation of cases to the particular judge a significant determinant for how the debtors and creditors will be treated and how the law will be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and litigators alike have long wondered about what is on the minds of judges. Kahan et al. have studied how judges' political commitments influence their perception of legally consequential facts. Sheri Johnson et al. confirmed the presence of implicit bias among a sample of judges and analyzed the relationship between that bias and the judges' decision-making. In a seminal piece and subsequent work, Guthrie et al. attempted to identify archetypes of judicial bias and opined about how we might debias judicial determinations. This project both contributes to and redirects these conversations in several important ways. First, the piece takes the conversation about judging into a court that daily touches the intimate affairs of litigants--namely family courts. In so doing, the project attempts to bring the same rigor of discussion about judicial bias, and imagination about corrective action, into one of the lower courts where litigants are routinely poor, disenfranchised, or unrepresented. Second, the project specifically sees connections between judicial bias and the orientation to fact finding that judges are invited to take--namely that the judge is the only fact finder (there are no juries) and judges are invited to place their own worldview and experiences at the epicenter of the scene playing out before them, an invitation that is inapposite to unbiased, rational consideration of the lives of others. In focusing specifically on how judicial bias thwarts expansive views of mothers and mothering in the twenty-first century, the piece aims to highlight the ways in which courts are in (imperfect and controlling) conversation with societal norms, norms that silence non-dominant narratives. Lastly, the project notices how the law's circumscribed examination of litigants' lives and the blindness to the ways that judges' lives constrict their world views stand in marked contrast to the orientation of therapists, where controlling for one's self and attention to a nuanced sense of other is the foundation from which therapists listen to, and learn about, people. Therefore, the project engages interdisciplinary scholarship not just to discuss what bias and stereotyping are, but also to excavate the ways in which the schooling and support in counseling professions aim to abate the gravitational pull toward bias. From this scaffolding, the piece closes with concrete, actionable steps for the bench and bar to resist bias and invite reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender bias in appointments at different judicial levels, whether in explicit or implicit forms, has been a prominent cause of the skewed gender ratio in the higher Indian judiciary. By basing this assertion on empirically collected qualitative and quantitative data, I argue that such bias operates in two forms: Structural bias and discretionary bias. Structural bias encompasses the biases embedded in judicial selection policies: First, the Supreme Court's unwritten "seniority norm," which favors the selection of the senior-most High Court judges to the apex court; and second, the "transfer policy" at the subordinate judicial level, which prohibits the appointment of judges at their place of residence or that of their spouse have emerged implicitly gender-biased. Discretionary bias includes biases exercised by judicial decision-makers based on their conscious or unconscious preferences have emerged implicitly gender-biased. I conclude that the prominent reason for gender-biased appointments is the failure by policymakers and decision-makers to consider women's differential responsibilities of motherhood and marriage, and the lack of responsibility-sharing by their husbands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research critically assesses the press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership bid and subsequent first months as the leader of the United Kingdom's Labour Party. A content analysis (n = 812) found that the British press offered a distorted and overly antagonistic view of the long-serving MP. Corbyn is often denied a voice and news organisations tended to prize anti-Corbyn sources over favourable ones. Much of the coverage is decidedly scornful and ridicules the leader of the opposition. This analysis also tests a set of normative conceptions of the media in a democracy. In view of this, our research contends that the British press acted more as an attackdog than a watchdog when it comes to the reporting of Corbyn. We conclude that the transgression from traditional monitorial practices to snarling attacks is unhealthy for democracy, and it furthermore raises serious ethical questions for UK journalism and its role in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December of 2017 Congress passed sweeping tax "reform" legislation known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This article highlights three aspects of the legislation that reflect implicit bias in the Code and facilitate the marginalization of women as a result of tax policy that fails to consider underlying demographic data with respect to the equitable distribution of tax expenditures. Specifically, this article analyzes the elimination of the alimony inclusion/deduction regime under §§ 71 and 215 of the Code, the disallowance of a deduction for legal fees associated with the settlement of sexual harassment and abuse claims that include nondisclosure agreements under § 162(q), and specific provisions designed to promote small businesses that exclude the vast majority of businesses owned by women. This article suggests that tax reform should endeavor to eliminate implicit bias in the Code by addressing the circumstances giving rise to the need for alimony in the first place; the barriers to success faced by women in the market, including discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault; and the circumstances that propel female entrepreneurs toward the types of business models that are excluded from substantial benefits under the Code. In order to effectuate the equitable distribution of tax expenditures and facilitate economic efficiency through tax policy, tax reform should reevaluate the normative view of marriage, families, and traditional business models reflected in the Code by taking into consideration underlying demographic data with respect to the effects of tax legislation on discrete groups of people. Further, tax reform should adopt a more holistic approach that takes into consideration the interconnected nature of the private and public lives of women struggling to participate equitably in the market and become economically self-sufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents some recommendations to prevent and discipline judicial bias in American courts to achieve an impartial and equitable judiciary. Also cited are how implicit biases are affected by one's race, sex, religion and age, the affirmative duty of judges under Model Rule 8.3(b), and the potential effects of elected and appointed judgeships on judicial bias enforcement.

Mediation is rapidly becoming one of the most preferred processes for individuals who wish an expeditious, fair, and autonomous resolution to disputes. Mediator neutrality and impartiality are the cornerstones of the mediation process and are often why individuals seek it as an alternative to litigation. With neutrality and impartiality being so important in the mediation process, it is equally important that the parties trust that the mediator has no biases which will compromise their neutrality and negatively impact the process. Explicit biases may be easily identified through contact with the mediator. But what about biases which the mediator herself is unaware of? Similarly, what about the personal biases which the parties and their advocates themselves are unaware of? Those biases, referred to as unconscious or implicit, can have a significant impact on the mediation process and can alter the outcome of the mediation. This paper will look at what implicit bias is, how it affects the mediation process, and why implicit bias testing and redress should be sought by mediators and parties prior to mediations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has examined the impact of the match between expert witness gender and the gender-orientation of the case, suggesting that traditional genderrole stereotyping was influencing mock jurors' decisions. Manipulations of the orientation of the domain of the case focus on the knowledge area of the case itself, rather than the actual knowledge of the expert. This reveals little about the impact of the association between the role of the expert and the expert's gender. The present study investigated whether perceivers make use of gender stereotypes as a shortcut for decisions when presented with the testimony of an expert witness. It was predicted that participants would award a higher amount of damages to the plaintiff when the plaintiff's expert's gender matched their role compared to when it did not match. It was also predicted that participants' evaluation of the plaintiff's expert witness's testimony and the expert would be more positive in the gender-role congruent condition. As expected, the female expert's testimony was viewed more positively when occupying a female-oriented role compared to a male-oriented role, and that the expertise of the female expert was evaluated more favourably in the femaleoriented role compared to the male-oriented role. Despite the impact of gender stereotypes in biasing the evaluation of expert testimony on several dimensions, this had no apparent impact on award decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The merits of using subjective probability theory as a normative standard for evidence evaluation by legal fact-finders have been hotly debated for decades. Critics argue that formal mathematical models only lead to an apparent precision that obfuscates the ad-hoc nature of the many assumptions that underlie the model. Proponents of using subjective probability theory as normative standard for legal decision makers, specifically proponents of using Bayesian networks as decision aids in complex evaluations of evidence, must show that formal models have tangible benefits over the more natural, holistic assessment of evidence by explanatory coherence. This article demonstrates that the assessment of evidence using a Bayesian network parametrized with values obtained from the decision makers reduces role-induced bias, a bias that has been largely resistant to de-biasing attempts so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The law of crime concentration states that half of the cumulative crime in a city will occur within approximately 4% of the city's geography. The law is demonstrated by counting the number of incidents in each of N spatial areas (street segments or grid cells) and then computing a parameter based on the counts, such as a point estimate on the Lorenz curve or the Gini index. Here we show that estimators commonly used in the literature for these statistics are biased when the number of incidents is low (several thousand or less). Our objective is to significantly reduce bias in estimators for the law of crime concentration. Methods: By modeling crime counts as a negative binomial, we show how to compute an improved estimate of the law of crime concentration at low event counts that significantly reduces bias. In particular, we use the Poisson–Gamma representation of the negative binomial and compute the concentration statistic via integrals for the Lorenz curve and Gini index of the inferred continuous Gamma distribution. Results: We illustrate the Poisson–Gamma method with synthetic data along with homicide data from Chicago. We show that our estimator significantly reduces bias and is able to recover the true law of crime concentration with only several hundred events. Conclusions: The Poisson–Gamma method has applications to measuring the concentration of rare events, comparisons of concentration across cities of different sizes, and improving time series estimates of crime concentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has previously been demonstrated that decisions made by forensic experts can suffer from issues with both bias and poor reliability. The outcome of Swedish forensic psychiatric investigations can have a major impact on the courts' choice of sanction for a mentally disordered offender. These investigations are performed by multi-professional teams of experts, where each expert is obliged to state their opinion on whether the client has a severe mental disorder (SMD) or not. In the present study, a case vignette design was used to simulate the decision-making process of forensic psychiatric investigations. Of the 73 Swedish experts working with forensic psychiatric investigations, a total of 27 (37%) participated in the study. The results showed that the Swedish experts formulated multiple diagnostic hypotheses about cases throughout the process and revised these hypotheses when presented with new information. There was substantial variation between the experts in which hypotheses were seen as most relevant. While the experts grew more certain of their opinions on SMD during the simulated investigation, there was considerable variation in their opinions both throughout and at the end of the process. Although low statistical power and the sample not being randomized limit generalizations, the results indicate no idiosyncratic patterns in the decision-making processes of Swedish experts or signs of confirmation bias. If used properly, the variation in both process and outcome could be used to safeguard and possibly increase the reliability and validity of the final decision of Swedish forensic psychiatric investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on rule changes by the Supreme Court of Missouri as of November 2019. Topics discussed include repeal of some paragraphs of the Comments of subdivision 2-2.3, entitled "Bias, Prejudice, and Harassment," repeal of subdivision 111.01, entitled "Preliminary Inquiry," of Rule 111, entitled "Preliminary Inquiry," and approval of Regulation for Disciplinary Hearing Officers and Regional Disciplinary Committee Members pursuant to Rules 5.02 and 5.04.

This review describes the ways in which contemporary forms of prejudice and stereotypes, which are often subtle and unconscious, give rise to critical problems throughout the legal system. This summary highlights dominant themes and understudied issues at the intersection of legal and psychological research. Three areas of focus are considered: law enforcement (policing), legal decision making, and the legal profession. Recommendations for future research and practice are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the parallels between the fiduciary rule against conflicts of interest and the rule against bias in judicial review, with a view to providing novel normative insights into the purpose of the fiduciary rule. It argues that, analogous to the main purpose of the rule against bias, the fiduciary no-conflict rule aims to insulate the exercise of discretion from self-interest or other irrelevant considerations that may affect, directly or indirectly, the reliability and trustworthiness of the fiduciary's decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "#MeToo" Movement has forced corporations and the entertainment industry, as well as state and federal executive and legislative branch officials, to take a hard look at gender inequities and sexual harassment in the workplace. But, how does our judicial system fare? Is the one branch of government charged with being fair and impartial in the interpretation and application of our laws truly fair and impartial? Between 2010 and 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court was the only state supreme court in the countiy that did not include any women or people of color. Does it matter? Is there an institutional bias when only one gender reviews, decides and writes opinions? Is the lack of female perspective on the court detrimental to women? This piece considers the real possibility of implicit gender bias in judicial opinion writing by deconstructing four recent Iowa Supreme Court ethics opinions written by an all-male Court wherein the survivors were female clients and/or intimate partners of the male attorney/abuser. Not only do the case results themselves raise questions but also the language those results are wrapped in may be even more revealing. This article examines both these results and language through the eyes of an Iowa woman who served as a trial Court judge in Iowa s largest judicial district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Custody disputes between a heterosexual parent and a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender ("LGBT") parent may trigger bias against the non-heterosexual parent. The following analysis will specifically look at custody disputes between a heterosexual parent and a LGBT parent, focusing on judicial bias against the LGBT parent compared to the heterosexual parent. There is a history of bias against LGBT parents in custody proceedings, and standards that permit the exercise of judicial discretion allow bias to impact the application of the facially neutral nexus test.3 This Note argues that problems with the fair application of the nexus test, as well as the implications of Obergefell v. Hodges,4 support the argument that the nexus test should be modified or abolished so that sexual orientation can never be allowed as a factor in custody determinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court patent decisions that have resulted in vague, less objective patent examination standards and evaluates how this might influence whether subjective biases. It mentions ways in which such subjectivity can allow examiners' implicit biases to impact female patent applicants. It also mentions study on gender bias during the patent examination process and potential solutions for reducing or eliminating the impact of biases.

The article focuses on scientific principles of cognitive neurobiology to implicit bias and exposes how implicit biases have permitted Christian morality to oppress minorities and females. It demonstrates that the perpetuation of this oppression is caused by traditional media's continued reliance on Christian morality as the basis of newsworthiness. It also mentions reformation of the newsworthiness privilege employs the changing paradigms of mass publication in the internet era.

Judges rarely reveal their real reasoning in their opinions when they are influenced by factors that they know they should not consider. The natural next question is how, when a judge is improperly influenced, he or she reasons to justify a biased decision. In a set of experiments using incumbent Chinese judges, we first replicated the findings of previous studies that showed judges can be influenced by extra‐legal factors. More importantly, we showed that judges may employ a range of legal techniques to rationalize decision biases: they interpret legal standards and legal concepts strategically, finesse the applicability of law, infer or deny causation and foreseeability, and draw different conclusions from facts. Our findings provide a more realistic understanding of how judges behave, and cast doubt on reasoned elaboration as a guarantee of judicial transparency and trustworthiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of scholarship that explores the problem of implicit bias. Through this work, commentators have taken pains to define the phenomenon and to describe the ways in which it contributes to misunderstanding, discrimination, inequality, and more. This article addresses the role of implicit cultural bias in the delivery of legal services. Lawyers routinely represent clients with backgrounds and experiences that are vastly different from their own, and the fact of these differences can impede understanding, communication, and, ultimately, effective representation. While other professions, such as medicine and social work, have adopted measures that are designed to mitigate the effects of cultural bias on service delivery, the legal profession lags far behind. In contrast to professionals in these other disciplines, lawyers have seen little by way of change--to either educational models or to the Rules of Professional Conduct--with an eye toward addressing the problem of cultural bias. This article seeks to highlight the failure of the legal profession to take such steps and suggests avenues for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether initial returns influence investors' decisions to return to the stock market following withdrawal. Using a survival analysis technique to estimate Finnish retail investors' likelihood of stock market re-entry reveals that investors who experience lower initial returns are less likely to return, even after controlling for returns in the last month and average monthly returns for the duration of investing. This primacy effect is robust to accounting for endogeneity in investors' exit decisions, and other behavioural biases such as recency and saliency of investment experience. Individual investors appear to be subject to primacy bias and tend to put a significant weight on initial experiences in re-entry decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Collins English Dictionary, voluntary sexual intercourse between a married man or woman and a partner other than the legal spouse is adultery. Adultery law as per Section 497 of IPC states that if a man has sexual intercourse with a married woman without her husband's consent, he is punishable by law. The man could be imprisoned for five years or more and even pay a fine. The law allows the aggrieved husband of a married woman in adulterous relationship to file a complaint. But the same right is not available to an aggrieved wife if her husband is found to be in an adulterous relationship. The adultery law in IPC reduces a woman to an object because no consent of the married woman is required for a man to have sexual intercourse with her. As per Section 497, if the woman's husband agrees, the act is not a crime. This is the reason many have called this as an anti-women law. This section of the IPC had remained controversial. It was challenged in courts claiming it to be against the Constitution of India. India's top court has now ruled that adultery is no longer a crime, striking down a 158-year-old colonial-era law which it said treated women as male property. This paper discusses the impact of the said ruling on the society and whether the ruling is a boon or a bane to the society in general and to the institution of marriage in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates whether private prosecutions remain a safe and useful mechanism in the modern New Zealand criminal justice system. Private prosecutions are an important constitutional safeguard against state inertia, incompetence and bias and recent legislative reforms have strengthened the judiciary's ability to ensure this mechanism is not misused. Despite this, concerns remain. This article provides an overview of private prosecutions and justification for their continued existence, outlines the current procedure for those prosecutions and explores remaining concerns with this mechanism. Ultimately, while the status quo of private prosecutions remains adequate, a greater alignment of the theoretical and practical purposes of private prosecutions would be beneficial. Further normalisation and commercialisation of private prosecutions is undesirable and the effectiveness of these prosecutions as a "safeguard" is questionable given the considerable financial and investigative burdens faced by applicants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laypeople are often deterred from undertaking altruistic acts, assuming that they face a risk of negligence liability should they injure others while helping. We argue that the laypeople's interpretation of the law does not correspond with the courts' interpretation of negligence liability. Reviewing the case law, we demonstrate that the courts treat such cases with leniency in the spirit of the Compensation Act 2006, s 1 and the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act (SARAH) 2015, s 2. Thus, the negligence liability rules do not offer a sufficient explanation for the widely-held opinion that acts of altruism may give rise to liability. We hypothesise that the public's perception of legal rules is determined by a number of well-known biases and is not founded in the law itself. In the light of those biases, we contend that the function of the Compensation Act 2006, s 1 and SARAH 2015 does not lie in the substance but in their value as potential signals to reassure laypeople. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All people harbor implicit biases--which by definition, are not always consciously recognized. Although trial judges are specifically trained to compartmentalize and shield their decisions from their own biases, implicit biases nonetheless seep into judicial decision making. This article explores various strategies to decrease implicit bias in bench trials. Questions are then raised about whether a judge who has faced bias personally would be more amenable and more open to curbing implicit bias professionally. Ultimately, does diversifying the trial court judiciary minimize implicit bias, while also creating a varied, multidimensional judicial voice comprised of multiple perspectives? This article will explore this potential interplay between diversifying the trial court judiciary and reducing implicit bias, while urging future quantitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common feature among populist parties and movements is their negative perspective on the media's role in society. This paper analyzes whether citizens with a populist worldview also hold negative attitudes toward the media. From a theoretical point of view, the paper shows that both the anti-elite, anti-outgroup and people centrism dimension of populism contradicts the normative expectations toward the media. For instance, the assumption of a homogeneous people and the exclusion of a societal outgroup is incompatible with a pluralistic media coverage. The results of a representative survey in Germany predominantly confirmed a relation between a populist worldview and negative media attitudes. However, the three populism dimensions influenced the evaluations not in a consistent way. A systematic relation could only be found for antielite populism, which is negatively associated with all analyzed media evaluations such as media trust or satisfaction with the media's performance. This indicates that in a populist worldview, the media are perceived as part of a detached elite that neglects the citizens' interests. However, the results confirm the assumption of a natural ally between populism and tabloid or commercial media. Individuals with people centrist and anti-outgroup attitudes have higher trust in these media outlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than two-hundred years, the issue of fair use has been the province of the jury. That recently changed when the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals decided Oracle America, Inc. v. Google LLC. At issue was whether Google fairly used portions of Oracle's computer software when Google created an operating system for smartphones. The jury found Google's use to be fair, but the Federal Circuit reversed. Importantly, the Federal Circuit applied a de novo standard of review to reach its conclusion, departing from centuries of precedent. Oracle raises a fundamental question in jurisprudence: Who should decide an issue-judge or jury? For the issue of fair use, the Seventh Amendment dictates that the jury should decide. The Seventh Amendment guarantees a right to a jury where an issue would have been heard by English common-law courts in 1791. Fair use is such an issue: early copyright cases make clear that juries decided fair-use issues at common law. Furthermore, the recent Supreme Court case of U.S. Bank National Ass'n v. Village at Lakeridge, LLC instructs appellate courts to employ a deferential standard in reviewing mixed questions of law and fact that resist factual generalizations. The question of fair use resists factual generalizations, turning on circumstances and factual nuances specific to each case. U.S. Bank thus suggests a deferential review. Importantly, this conclusion is consistent with the Supreme Court's instruction in Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, where the Court applied an independent review of a district court's finding on fair use. The context of the Harper Court's independent review was a bench trial, and at that time, courts treated the review of fair use at a bench trial differently from the review of fair use at a jury trial. Finally, juries are simply better positioned than judges to decide the sort of issues that arise in fair-use cases. Those issues call for subjective judgments that turn on cultural understandings and social norms, and the heterogeneous perspective of a jury is particularly valuable in making these judgments. Thus, the Federal Circuit in Oracle wrongly applied a de novo standard. The Constitution, precedent, and sound policy mandate deference to the jury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do jurors construe and apply facts and law to decide the point at which a defendant's thoughts and actions cross the line from being legally innocent to criminal? And under what doctrinal circumstances are such lay constructions of criminality vulnerable to legal misunderstanding and bias? Although these are high-stakes questions, the black box of the jury room leaves the legal system largely in the dark about the answers. Shining an empirical light on this domain, this Article employs tools of psychology to investigate how lay decisionmakers construe and apply legal standards for criminal attempt--a doctrine that imposes liability when a defendant intends and initiates a crime but does not successfully complete it. There are two dominant standards for the act element of attempt, but both are vague and ambiguous in defining the point at which liability attaches. Jurors are thus implicitly required to determine not only whether the defendant's conduct has met the threshold for criminal attempt, but also where that legal threshold lies. The fundamental question of how lay decisionmakers without legal training are likely to execute this cognitively challenging task has never been empirically tested. To fill this practical and methodological gap, I present the results of three original experimental studies on lay constructions of attempt law. My findings uncover striking disconnects between legal expectations and lay determinations of criminal attempt. Contrary to legislative design, the common law's theoretically more defense-friendly "proximity" test (which draws the line of attempt liability closer to completion of the intended crime) emerges as more prosecution-friendly in lay applications than the Model Penal Code's "substantial step" test (which theoretically seeks to expand attempt liability). The proximity test also appears to be more susceptible to bidirectional biases that lead to discriminatory legal outcomes. Drawing upon psychology theory to explain these findings, I propose that the linguistic framing of the proximity test may unconsciously activate a sense of criminal "nearness" that anchors decisionmakers to harsher outcomes. The language of the proximity test may also be more likely to invoke a sense of threat, which can activate stereotypes that bias decisionmaking based on legally extrinsic factors, such as the defendant's implied religion and the type of crime he is charged with attempting. This Article's findings challenge the legal community's established understandings of attempt law, and also speak to lay constructions of criminal liability more broadly by providing new insights into how jurors may interpret the act requirement of a criminal offense in light of its mental state requirement. Furthermore, by illustrating how lay-legal disconnects can inadvertently undermine legislative intent and how the language of the law itself can trigger unfair prejudice, the results bear implications for any area of law in which jurors are tasked with applying opaquely defined legal standards. Having empirically identified potential doctrinal and cognitive entry points for legal misunderstanding and bias in lay adjudication, I then suggest some novel steps that the legal system could consider taking to address these risks. My proposals entail rethinking how legislatures formulate legal standards, how courts convey these standards to jurors, and how jurors deliver their verdicts. I conclude by highlighting some key psychological and doctrinal directions for future research. Empirically unveiling the psychology of how lay decisionmakers construct legal liability, and drawing upon these insights to help jurors better understand the law, could unfurl promising new pathways toward more informed and fair decisionmaking in the justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]