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Demonstrations, rallies, changes to the law, increased prosecutions-all of these things are vital to making sure that all lives-black, brown, or white; female or male; Christian, Jewish, or Muslim; gay or straight-are equally valued by the public and in the execution of the law. But just as important is the stand that ordinary people take in everyday situations... the raising of voice as situations arise in the forums of our lives. Giving voice is the driving force of this essay and the logic behind this special issue of Sociological Forum: Whose Lives Matter?: Violence, Social Control, and the Racial Divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theoretical project intervenes in the debates surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin by starting with fear, the center of Martin's encounter with his killer, George Zimmerman. We deploy the work of Sara Ahmed in order to argue that fear, rather than residing positively in an individual, works as an affective economy that opens up past histories of association. Ahmed's work allows us to move beyond the question of whether or not Zimmerman was consciously racist and instead consider how fear is animated by racist histories of association. We argue that the affective charge of these racist histories accomplishes three interrelated things. First, it allows Zimmerman to frame Martin as dangerous as he calls 911 to report Martin's suspicious presence, an act that comes to constitute Zimmerman's fear. Second, it allows for Martin to be seized epistemologically and ontologically by Zimmerman and killed. Last, it makes Martin's death a functional necessity of Zimmerman's defense, making it challenging to leverage any claim for the injustice of Martin's death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Texas death-penalty statute skews the sentencing decision toward death and corresponding constitutional jurisprudence. It mentions Texas statute draws on the representativeness and anchoring-and-adjustment heuristics to bias the jury in favor of death and asserting that Texas should abandon its haphazardly adopted statute. It also mentions encourages juries to return a death verdict by engaging two cognitive heuristics.

The article presents an essay on public administration practice in the U.S. Topics discussed include traditional public administration practice, questions raised about American public administration theory due to foreign public administration practice along with article by Frederick Mosher about the American bias of public administration and the book "The Language of Public Administration" written by the author.

How are women on the bench, and their decisions, perceived by the public? Many scholars find that gender influences the voting behavior of judges and the assessment of judges by state judicial systems and the American Bar Association. However, few scholars have examined how judge gender affects the way in which the public responds to judicial outcomes. Does the public perceive the decisions of female state court judges as being "biased" by their gender identity, particularly in cases involving reproductive rights/family law? Also, does the public view female judges on state courts as more likely to rely on ideology when ruling in cases? Using a survey experiment that varies judge gender in a state child custody case, we examine whether respondents exhibit less support for judicial decisions authored by female state court judges. Additionally, we test whether respondents are more likely to perceive the decisions of female state court judges as ideologically biased or as a product of gender influences (as compared to male judges). Finally, we assess whether these effects are conditional on or exacerbated by respondent characteristics such as gender, race, and religiosity. The influence of gender on public response to state court decisions has important implications for our understanding of why certain court decisions find public support and acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on changes that moot-court programs and moot-court competitions and documents the continuing existence of bias and barriers to ascent in the legal profession. It mentions psychological theories mindset theory and stereotype threat which may illuminate challenges and opportunities for mitigating the impact of implicit bias. It also mentions concrete solutions to the problem and to students, faculty, and volunteer judges to increase awareness of the implicit bias.

This article explores how Australian courts have grappled with the challenges of changing context and a frenetic case load in their application of the rule against bias. In their efforts to keep this sacrosanct rule relevant and coherent they have employed three key tools of 'calibration': the 'fair-minded lay observer', the spectrum of standards, and a (re)emerging technique of sub-categorisation or 'speciation'. The lay observer has wearied, becoming awkwardly indistinct in important contexts; the spectrum approach has enjoyed an expanding importance but now appears to have reached its high-water mark; however, the 'speciation' approach has shown its precision and is perhaps the key to the next generation of cases. This article re-maps the bias rule in Australia by reference to these three tools of calibration, thereby placing the accumulating critique of the 'lay observer' test into clearer context. It also offers some predictions on the law's future trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do judges make decisions that are truly impartial? A wide range of experimental and field studies reveal that several extralegal factors influence judicial decision making. Demographic characteristics of judges and litigants affect judges' decisions. Judges also rely heavily on intuitive reasoning in deciding cases, making them vulnerable to the use of mental shortcuts that can lead to mistakes. Furthermore, judges sometimes rely on facts outside the record and rule more favorably toward litigants who are more sympathetic or with whom they share demographic characteristics. On the whole, judges are excellent decision makers and sometimes resist common errors of judgment that influence ordinary adults. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests that judges are vulnerable to systematic deviations from the ideal of judicial impartiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A salient and underresearched aspect of un/fair treatment in organizations can be the source of justice, in terms of a specific justice agent. We propose a model of agent bias to describe how and when characteristics of the agent enacting justice are important to justice reasoning. The agent bias is defined as the effect on overall event justice perceptions of specific agent characteristics, over and above the effect via distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. For justice recipients to focus on agent characteristics rather than on the event being evaluated in terms of fairness is an unexplored bias in justice judgments. Agent warmth, competence, and past justice track record (entity justice) are identified as agent characteristics that influence justice judgments. Agent characteristics can influence overall event justice perceptions positively or negatively, depending on the ambiguity in terms of justice of the event and on its expectedness from a particular justice agent. Finally, we propose that agent bias is stronger when justice recipients use intuitive versus analytic information processing of event information. Our model of agent bias has important theoretical implications for theories of organizational justice and for other literatures, as well as important practical implications for organizations and managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While systematic literature reviews ( SLRs) have contributed substantially to developing knowledge in fields such as medicine, they have made limited contributions to developing knowledge in the supply chain management domain. This is due to the ontological and epistemological idiosyncrasies of research in supply chain management, which need to be accounted for when retrieving, selecting, and synthesizing studies in an SLR. Therefore, we propose a new paradigm for SLRs in the supply chain domain that is based on both best practice and the unique attributes of doing supply chain management research. This approach involves exploring existing studies with attention to theoretical boundaries, units of analysis, sources of data, study contexts, and definitions and the operationalization of constructs, as well as research methods, with the goal of refining or revising existing theory. This new paradigm will push supply chain management research to the frontier of current methodological standards and build a foundation for improving the contribution of future SLRs in the supply chain and adjacent management disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thin film transistors (TFTs) incorporating high mobility In-Ga-Zn-O (IGZO) semiconductors were fabricated and evaluated. The Ar:O 2 gas flow rates were varied during the sputter growth of IGZO layers, which had a substantial influence on the device performance and stability under negative bias stress (NBS) and negative bias illumination stress (NBIS). As the Ar gas flow rate is increased, the TFTs exhibit inferior performance and stability. Thin film analyses indicate that the relative content of oxygen deficient sites in IGZO increases with increasing Ar gas flow rate, which is accompanied with more pronounced device degradation under bias stress. Relatively high oxygen deficiency usually leads to the generation of excess free carriers in oxide semiconductors, which normally results in high field effect mobility. However a counter-intuitive decrease in mobility is observed in this work, which is suggested to originate from the overall decrease in IGZO film density as a result of elevated sputtering pressure at high Ar gas flow rates. It is conjectured that disruptions of conduction paths occur in low density IGZO layers, owing to the lack of overlap between metal 5s orbitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Williams v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court established a new recusal rule, narrowly tailored to situations in which a judge previously participated as a prosecutor in the same case. In keeping with the Court's decisions in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal and In re Murchison, the Court correctly determined that such direct, prior involvement created an impermissible appearance of judicial bias, such that a judge must recuse himself or herself from the decision. Furthermore, the Court's recusal requirement is necessary in light of the ever-changing political environment and the public's growing distrust of the independence and neutrality of the judiciary. As a result of Williams, the Court may find itself turning inward tofurther examine its own recusal decisions, requiring greater attention to circumstances in which the Justices may have a personal connection to a case or controversy, such that it would create the appearance or existence of actual judicial bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rule against bias is a central tenet of English law and it also impacts on collegiate courts which typically exercise appellate/review jurisdictions over their professional or student members. This is true of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) which has established the adjudicatory bodies to enforce its regulatory framework and has vested the procedure of fair trials upon the Council of the Inns of Court (‘COIC’) which is responsible for appointing the Disciplinary Tribunal panels that conduct hearings for professional misconduct. The COIC has been exposed for ‘irregularities’ in the findings of guilt against barristers who have been adjudged by non-qualified judges. InR(on the application of Mehey & Ors) v Visitors to the Inns of Court and Ors [2014] EWCA Civ 1630, the Court of Appeal ruled that a disciplinary tribunal or a panel of visitors appointed from barristers or lay representatives outside its pool of enrolled judges would still ensure independence and guarantee freedom from outside pressure. The impugned tribunal members who were not entitled to sit nevertheless had authority to act asde factojudges. This part of the ruling reinforces the regulatory bodies inherent power to appoint its own tribunal to adjudicate and it needs a more rigorous application of natural justice principle on the part of the BSB. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many have embraced evidence from the mind sciences that our behaviors are often influenced by our implicit biases rather than our conscious beliefs. This is one reason why implicit bias has become a staple in trainings for judges, lawyers, police officers, teachers, and health care providers. While understanding that implicit bias is important, social science research demonstrates that implicit bias alone does not fully account for the racial dynamics that undermine student achievement and trigger disproportionately harsh discipline, diminish the efficacy of health care and affect morbidity and mortality rates, trigger harsher prison sentences, result in child removal, and lead to unnecessary uses of force by police against civilians. Following the "behavioral realist" approach to provide the most empirically accurate understanding of human behavior, in this Essay, we introduce "racial anxiety" as an additional lens for understanding racial disparities of all types. In the social psychological literature, racial anxiety refers to the concerns that often arise both before and during interracial interactions. People of color experience racial anxiety when they worry that they will be subject to discriminatory treatment. White people, on the other hand, experience it when they worry that they will be perceived as racist. Racial anxiety can influence behaviors and judgments in ways that contribute to significant and unwarranted racial disparities even in the absence of both conscious and implicit racial bias. Additionally, in concert with implicit racial bias, racial anxiety can aggravate interracial dynamics in ways that create significant harm. This Essay explores how racial anxiety operates, discusses its probable effects on police-civilian and doctor-patient interactions, and highlights interventions for mitigating its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Tiempos Modernos is the property of Tiempos Modernos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on alleged biases of the International Criminal Court (ICC) toward African states on the grounds of human rights violation. It discusses ICC's investigations and decisions against states of Uganda, the Democratic Repub­lic of Congo, and the Central African Re­public. It discusses the drafting of the Rome Statute, its flaws and limitations, and withdrawal attempt of states such as South Africa, Gambia and Burundi from ICC. It discusses immunity for Heads of State with example of President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir.

The article discusses how people find themselves caught between two apparently contradictory imperatives, including a bias towards the future and a concern for the overall quality of their lives. It adds that the basic problem of temporal asymmetry is an apparent disconnect between people's time invariant judgments about the welfare disvalue or value of a given event and their time-sensitive conative attitudes towards it.

The article analysis weather evidence of common insurance demonstrates relevant expert witness bias in medical negligence lawsuit in the U.S. Topics discussed include an account of professional medical liability insurance and physician negligence; laws governing the same under Federal Rule of Evidence such as liability insurance; and Ede v. Atrium South OB-GYN court case on the same.

Estimates of the most common mobility measure, the intergenerational elasticity, can be severely biased if snapshots are used to approximate lifetime income. However, little is known about biases in other popular dependence measures. Using long Swedish income series, we provide such evidence for log-linear and rank correlations, and rank-based transition probabilities. Attenuation bias is considerably weaker in rank-based measures. Life-cycle bias is strongest in the elasticity, moderate in log-linear correlations, and small in rank-based measures. However, there are important exceptions: persistence in the tails of the distribution is considerably higher and long-distance downward mobility lower than estimates from short-run income suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The judicial role of Canadian judges is changing to allow judges to make trials fairer, more accessible, and more efficient. Along with the changing role of judges has come new tools, including pretrial settlement and case management conferences, and even active adjudication during the course of the trial. However, this new role and the use of its associated tools have the potential to raise an apprehension of bias. This article focuses on recent case law and commentary addressing case management and active adjudication by judges, with the aim of clarifying the boundary between permissible judicial intervention that fosters fairness and efficiency, and impermissible interventions that raise an apprehension of bias. Additionally, we discuss the role counsel can play in helping to avoid concerns of bias from arising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today’s demonstration, we explored the audience’s positive and negative associations with blacks and whites. The demonstration is an adaptation of the Implicit Association Test (www.projectimplicit.net), a computer-based task designed to explore mental connections between various concepts. Participants were presented with a list of concepts (stereotypically black and white names, pleasant and unpleasant concepts) in a column down the middle of a screen along with the response categories (black/white or Pleasant/Unpleasant) along the left and right sides. When reading a word, participants were asked to categorize it by slapping the knee (left or right) that corresponds to the category displayed on the left or right side of the screen. Their task was to do this as fast as possible, correcting any mistakes before going forward, and raising their hand after completing the last word in the list. We then noted the amount of time for a critical mass of participants (approximately seventy-five percent) to complete each trial. In simple trials, either names or valenced words are displayed. In two critical trials, both names and valenced words were presented simultaneously in the middle of the screen. The trials differ based on the pairings of the response categories, and these trials tend to show a drastic difference in completion times. When participants were required to use the same hand to categorize black names and unpleasant words or white names and pleasant words, they tended to respond almost twice as quickly as when using the same hand to categorize black names and pleasant words or white names and unpleasant words. While there are individual differences among the respondents, the demonstration provided audible and visceral evidence of the trend. We then asked the audience to interrogate the methodological and cultural implications of the task, ultimately concluding that the test potentially reveals the fairly widespread implicit negative associations with blacks. With this working hypothesis, we next discussed the nature of racial bias and its implications for judgment in legal domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of implicit bias as evidence in employment discrimination claims continues to evolve, as does research attempting to explain and quantify the concept of implicit bias. In Walmart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court curbed plaintiffs' use of implicit bias as evidence in support of the commonality requirement of Rule 23. Post-Dukes, plaintiffs have looked for creative ways to leverage scientific developments in implicit bias within the legal framework of employment discrimination law. The most promising answer to the "Dukes problem" looks to implicit bias as substantive, rather than procedural, evidence. By repackaging implicit bias as social-framework evidence, plaintiffs can persuasively contextualize for factfinders the ways in which differential treatment plays out in a workplace, even in the absence of overtly discriminatory attitudes or stereotypes. Whether courts will adapt to this use of implicit bias is increasingly important, as modern workplace discrimination is becoming more subtle and often is the result of unconscious biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, we examined how 5-­year-­olds weigh similarity against other factors in deciding from whom to learn. Specifically, we examined the factors of history of and reasons for inaccuracy in Experiment 1 (n = 64) and of competence and authority in Experiment 2 (n = 32). In the 1st phase of Experiments 1 and 2, children’s social biases were tested: 5-year-olds met both a similar informant (SI) and a dissimilar informant (DI). These informants were puppets (Experiment 1) or human teachers (Experiment 2). Children could select either informant as a source of object names. Across experiments children systematically preferred learning from the SI over DI. In the 2nd phase of Experiment 1, both informants first provided accurate information and then 1 of them became inaccurate during an event that clearly explained (being blindfolded) or did not explain (wearing a scarf) the inaccuracy. For half the children, the SI was accurate and the DI was inaccurate. Only after inaccuracy events that were causally unclear did children showcase similarity biases in their subsequent learning preferences. Experiment 2 showed that identifying a DI as a teacher (a profession associated with positive attributes) failed to counter children’s similarity bias. These findings provide important insights on contextual factors that contribute to children’s favoring of socially meaningful others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguments on legal evidence rely on generalizations, that link a certain circumstance to a certain hypothesis and warrants the claim that the circumstance makes the hypothesis more probable. Some generalizations are acceptable and others are unacceptable. A generalization can be unacceptable on at least four different grounds. A false generalization is unacceptable because membership in the reference class does not increase the probability of the hypothesis. A non-robust generalization is unacceptable because it uses a reference class that is too heterogeneous. A biastriggering generalization is unacceptable because decision makers are inclined to overestimate the evidentiary value of membership in the reference class. A discriminating generalization is unacceptable because it puts members in the reference class in an unfair disadvantage. Research funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish correctional institutions admitted in 2014 more than 8000 people in pretrial detention. Some of them will be absolved after an inquiry and they will be found innocent having spent time in prison. The present study examines cases in which the State, in the interest of public safety, deprives innocent people of freedom. The ultimate purpose of this study is to analyze the possible presence of bias or judicial heuristics in decision-making. To this end, 70 sentences later compensated for wrongful detention and 136 convictions after pretrial detention have been systematically analyzed. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the age, the sex, the nationality, or the criminal records of the innocent and convicts. Nevertheless, differences in the type of crime have been observed. Serious crimes (murder or sexual assault) have been significantly more frequent in compensatory judgments, while the prisoners have been convicted of minor offenses (theft or crimes against road safety). Finally, we discuss the need to conduct research that is generalizable to a target ecology. This will allow study of wrongful convictions both in general and in the application of undue pretrial detention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are racially-motivated hate crimes, non-criminal bias incidents, and general forms of crime associated with the same structural factors? If so, then social disorganization, a powerful structural correlate of general crime, should predict rates of hate incidents. However, tests of social disorganization's effects on racially-motivated hate crime yield inconsistent results. This study uses data from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) to explore such inconsistencies. Specifically, we assess the effects of social disorganization across contexts and types of bias motivation using bias incidents over 12 years. The results suggest that (a) social disorganization, particularly residential instability, is robustly correlated with rates of both hate crime and other prejudicial conduct, and that (b) the interactive effects of social disorganization help explain variations in incident rates by motivation type. Specifically, anti-black incidents are most frequent in unstable, homogeneous (i.e. white) and advantaged communities, while anti-white incidents are most frequent in unstable, disadvantaged communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers studying discrimination and bias frequently conduct experiments that use racially distinctive names to signal race. The ability of these experiments to speak to racial discrimination depends on the excludability assumption that subjects' responses to these names are driven by their reaction to the individual's putative race and not some other factor. We use results from an audit study with a large number of aliases and data fromdetailed public records to empirically test the excludability assumption undergirding the use of racially distinctive names. The detailed public records allow us to measure the signals about socioeconomic status and political resources that each name used in the study possibly could send. We then reanalyze the audit study to see whether these signals predict legislators' likelihood of responding. We find no evidence that politicians respond to this other information, thus providing empirical support for the excludability assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document that consistent patterns of high or low sales growth that are incongruent with underlying fundamentals are followed by significant stock price reversals. In contrast, no stock return reversals are found for firms that achieve the same level of sales growth in an inconsistent manner. Furthermore, future earnings announcement returns mimic the pattern of abnormal stock returns documented for the Consistent- and Inconsistent-Growth portfolios, respectively, corroborating our main findings. Our results are robust to controls for the magnitude of sales growth, fundamental strength, business cycle risk exposures, and standard risk factors. Our evidence is consistent with representativeness bias affecting investor interpretation of consistency in sales growth patterns. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]