Over the last several decades, multiple schools of thought have emerged regarding what impacts judicial decision making. In contrast to the classic legal model, studies have argued alternatively that judges are policy actors who rule consistent with their political attitudes; that behavioral traits such as race, gender and socialization influence judicial conduct, both consciously and unconsciously; that whatever policy interests judges may have, these are moderated by institutional constraints and strategic considerations; and that judges are subject to some common cognitive shortcuts in decision making, although they may be moderated or present differently than in the general population in light of their training and experience. Most of these studies, particularly in political science, have tended to focus on Supreme Court or appellate decisions on politically salient subject matter such as the scope of the Fourth Amendment or racial discrimination. The cognitive studies, by comparison, have primarily used experimental conduct, often with artificially extreme variations between legal and factual issues to assess the impact of legal training. Other than field review articles, most have focused on a single potential explanatory variable such as ideology, gender or legal training. To date, there has been very limited study of the more routine tasks judges engage in at the trial court level such as pre-trial evidentiary rulings or comparative assessments of the relative explanatory power of factors drawn from multiple approaches to decision making. The present study involved both a qualitative and quantitative assessment of Federal district court decisions on the admissibility of expert witnesses. Employing thematic analysis of all cases involving a substantive analysis of this issue from 2010-2015 in nine district courts, a default pattern emerged that judges are reluctant to exclude experts except in extreme cases. Moreover, judges appear to have adopted several practices consistent with minimizing the cognitive burden of decision making. These findings suggest that judges are acting consistently with legal norms and the broad outlines of legal precedent, but in a manner which may lead to sub-optimal outcomes in some circumstances. Quantitative analysis of the same data suggests that judges are subject to a variety of significant influences including legal precepts, political ideology and cognitive heuristics in different settings. Moreover, the influence of issues such as ideology appear to be associated with some courts and not others, with circuit level precedent being the most obvious intervening factor to explain the difference. The circuit level impacts on behavior and several other findings in this study suggest that much more nuance is present than is normally acknowledged in the study of judicial decision making. The results of this study also suggest policy makers should account for cognitive tendencies in crafting legal standards and precedents as well as legal education. Finally, it posits that practitioners can maximize their odds of success on motions to exclude expert witnesses through similar awareness of what influences judicial conduct, especially but not limited to cognitive limitations in rendering judgments under time constraints and conditions of uncertainty.

It is generally agreed that a criminal justice system reflects the values of the society within which it exists. The presence of patriarchal social values will likely affect the response of the criminal justice system to intimate violence. While the perpetration of violence against another is a violation of an important social norm, patriarchal values may function to discount the seriousness of such an act, if the violence is perpetrated by a man against his girlfriend or wife. This discount of seriousness may lead to less severe punishment for men who assault their intimates than to men who assault nonintimates. The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that men who are convicted of committing serious assaults against female intimates receive more lenient punishment than men who are convicted of committing serious assault against nonintimates. Punishment was defined as sentencing outcomes, i. e. type and length of sentence. The sentences of offenders convicted of felony assaults as the major offense and subject to sentencing guidelines in Oregon in 1993 were examined. Chi-square tests were used to compare the sentence types of intimate and nonintimate violence offenders. Two-tailed !-tests and multiple linear regression were used to examine the relationship between victim-offender relationship and length of sentence. It appears that the presence of Oregon's sentencing guidelines, rather than victim-offender relationship, had the greatest effect upon the severity of punishment. This finding suggests that the guidelines may be responsible for minimizing the impact of patriarchal values on sentencing decisions in serious assault cases.

In the legal and mental health fields little is known about the therapeutic impact of courtroom psychology during criminal trials. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the inter-relating factors of law and psychology throughout criminal trials as experienced by lawyers and psychologists. Research questions explored the influence of courtroom psychology on criminal trial proceedings and challenges as experienced by both criminal trial attorneys in presenting mental health evidence, and by psychologists when testifying during criminal trials. Further exploration focused on the significance of courtroom psychology, and how lawyers and psychologists perceived courtroom psychology impacting justice for victims and influencing offender rehabilitation sentencing decisions. Procedural justice was the conceptual framework utilized in this investigation, and therapeutic jurisprudence was the theoretical base that guided this study. A qualitative-phenomenological research design was applied by interviewing 4 criminal law attorneys and 4 clinical forensic psychologists. Four themes emerged from the thematic analysis of the data collected: (a) an increase in the enhancement of psycho-legal services, (b) a need for additional education, (c) a desire to improve professional relationships through collaborative efforts, and (d) a demand for requiring advanced training. These results may serve as a foundation for professionals to provide ethically effective and relevant legal-therapeutic services for progressing courtroom psychology measures. Implications for positive social change from this research include recommendations to government, legal, and mental health system entities to consider generating and readjusting standards of practice that govern criminal trial proceedings.

No description available.

Making Copies: The Impact of Photocopying on Copyright Law in Australia In recent years, there has been a growing interest in looking at the history of copyright law through the lens of different technologies. Rather than looking at the historical development of, for example, copyright defences, the development of a specific piece of legislation or the way in which copyright law as distinct body of law took shape, there is a growing interest in looking at the way in which copyright law was shaped and influenced by specific types of technology. This literature is based on the idea that by focusing on the way that the law responded to a particular technology, that this enables us to get a better sense of the way in which the different legal rules and procedures operate and intersect: something that tends to be lost in more focused doctrinal or policy accounts. While there have been a number of important studies that focus on the impact of specific technologies, notably the printing press, on the development of copyright law, there are many other technologies that have not been given the attention they deserve. The thesis aims to contribute to the growing body of copyright scholarship that looks at the impact that specific technologies have had on copyright law. More specifically, it aims to look at the impact that the photocopier had on the development of copyright law across the second half of twentieth century. In effect, the question that the thesis asks is: what impact did photocopying have on the development of copyright law in Australia? The thesis shows that in responding to the problems created photocopier, a number of important changes were made to copyright law. In addition to contributing to the introduction of published edition copyright, it will be argued that the photocopier not only led to the introduction of library copying provisions which have played and continue to play an important role in ensuring access to information, but also helped to clarify that the fair dealing defence extended beyond hand copying to include machine copies. As well as highlighting the impact that the photocopying licences, which were introduced to deal with multiple copies, had on copyright law, it will be also be argued that the photocopier led to other changes, such as the politicisation of literary copyright. In highlighting the various changes brought about as a result of the attempt to respond to the problems created by the photocopier, the thesis will highlight the important role that technological change has had on the development of copyright law.

In recent decades, national governments and international authorities have increasingly emphasized the role of legal institutions in restoring order after political violence. This study explores how, following the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government created new decentralized grassroots legal forums that aimed to produce community out of a divided population. The legal institutions were designed to enable Rwandans to resolve disputes with the help of locally-elected mediators, based on principles that prioritized collective cohesion over individual rights, combined with state-backed punishment. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in Rwanda between 2004 and 2008 with genocide courts (inkiko gacaca), mediation committees (comite y'abunzi) and a legal aid clinic, this study shows how the discourse of mediation in courts derived from national and transnational processes, and how it shaped people's experiences across a wide range of disputes. People used the courts' flexible proceedings both to rebuild inclusive relationships, and to contest belonging and reinforce divisions. The study suggests that state-backed legal forums embedded in daily life can facilitate social rebuilding in the aftermath of violence, while it examines what differences are created as "community" is brought into being through politicized processes, and shows how customary law as a tool of state development can both empower and curtail rights.

The Variable Child concerns the legal decision-making process in unaccompanied child refugee applications, and the role that conceptions of childhood play in the process. I examine when particular types of knowledge are drawn upon by legal actors, as well as the effects of the claim-making practices that create meaning, or truth effects, in legal decision-making. I identify how legal actors exercise discretion by investigating how facts are constructed with different ideas about childrens competence, abilities and knowledge. The Unaccompanied Child Refugee Evidentiary and Procedure Guidelines, which governs legal decisions, has embedded within it various, sometimes competing, conceptions of the child and childhood. These multiple notions create considerable discretionary space for refugee officers to make decisions about individual cases. My examination of legal decisions reveals a strategic use of vulnerable and/or responsible conceptions of childhood. Another strategy used to establish facts in these cases is to exclude the cultural differences of childhood both these practices are accomplished through employing several different knowledge moves. Refugee officers invoke vulnerable and/or responsible constructions of childhood to displace the impact of other/alternative constructions of childhood, namely Chinese ideas of parental relations. This avoids the potential for legal decisions to set standards for similar cases in the future. Childhood studies have documented how different axes of scholarly inquiry produce different understandings, typologies, and knowledges of the child and childhood. What remains understudied is how competing knowledges of the child and childhood are applied, negotiated, and formalized in legal decision-making. My study investigates how power relations constitute particular constructions of childhood, and the consequences these relations have for childrens lives. Unlike examining childhood as contextual, I document how variable understandings of the child and childhood are constituted, institutionalized, and normalized through the law. My study examines the complexities of legal decision-making, a process that is often black-boxed. I also trace which conceptions of childhood are drawn upon to substantiate legal claims, and how a social context for the child and childhood emerges. By examining the relations of law in the context of children, my work contributes to the growing area of childhood studies and socio-legal practices.

No description available.

Dominant theories of aboriginal rights articulate the relation between rights and identity in terms of a logic which treats identity as an irreducible good and rights as the instrumental means of its protection. However, identity claims and legal claims emerge in our use of language. Identity and the institutions in which identities are expressed and experienced are constituted in speech. A close analysis reveals the degree to which law and identity are a systemic imbrication of normative claims characterized by an innate indeterminacy. This indeterminacy renders all rights and identity claims contingent on their reception and validation by others.

This thesis examines the role of interpretation in legal encounter in Lexington, Kentucky. Through an analysis of legal and interpretation practices, this study seeks to ascertain how these practices may affect non-native or low-proficiency English speakers’ (LLPs) experiences with both federal and local laws and legal spaces. This place-based study involves in-depth qualitative research. Using the methodological framework of feminist geo-jurisprudence, this research contributes to our understanding of 1) the limits of the publicity of legal space and, more specifically, the ways in which language barriers can prevent legal inclusion; 2) local strategies and tactics for dealing with the challenges to meaningful access before the law in terms of language as outlined by Title IV of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act; 3) the broader implications of language access for immigrants and non-citizens at the intersection of legal discourse and society (discursive legal space). Furthermore, this research addresses the absence and presence of hospitality (Derrida, 2005) from this site of citizenship negotiation, and it addresses the ethics of hospitality behind the work that attempts to resist legal closure and to enforce laws that protect, rather than persecute, those facing language barriers.