SW 15: Judicial Decision-Making: Integrating Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives Book of Abstracts (original) (raw)
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Psychology, Crime & Law, 2018
This research examines whether judges' pretrial detention decisions trigger confirmation bias in their guilt assessments. It also tests two strategies to mitigate confirmation bias: (1) to have different judges decide about detention and guilt and (2) to reduce cognitive load by structuring the evaluation of evidence. In Experiment 1, Swedish judges (N = 64) read 8 scenarios in which they either decided themselves about detention or were informed about a colleague's decision. Then, participants rated the defendant's trustworthiness, the strength of each piece of evidence, the total evidence and decided about guilt. In Experiment 2, Law students (N = 80) either first rated each piece of evidence separately and then the total evidence (structured evaluation) or only the total evidence (unstructured evaluation), and then decided about guilt. Overall, detained defendants were considered less trustworthy and when participants themselves detained, they rated the guilt consistent and total evidence as stronger and were more likely convict, compared to when a colleague had detained. The total evidence was considered stronger after unstructured than structured evaluations of the evidence but the evaluation mode did not influence guilt decisions. This suggests that changing decision maker holds greater debiasing potential than structuring evidence evaluation.
Mátyás Bencze, Gar Yein Ng (eds.): How to Measure the Quality of Judicial Reasoning. Springer, 2018
Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies, 2019
Measuring the unmeasurable'-this is the main concept of the book and it is also the title of the editors' introductory study. This phrase also wonderfully describes the research project's and the authors' hard challenge. To write about something and then to explain its subsequent quality, judicial reasoning in this case is something very unique, individual, complex and different on a case by case basis. The book is edited by Mátyás Bencze and Gar Yein Ng and the volume concentrates on the quality of judicial forums' reasoning method. The project was based on the cooperation between Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre of Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies and the University of Debrecen, Faculty of Law. The book consists of fifteen studies, conducted with the assistance of several prestigious legal scholars and legal practitioners. The book has two main parts, in which the first contains essays from the perspective of legal theory, legal sociology, philosophy and behavioural law and economics. The other part colligates the main conclusions from the practice of some national and international judicial forums. Judges, judicial decisions and judicial argumentation have always had both academic and societal attention, so it may be thought that the issue is well and widely known. It is an age-old experience that judges have three important challenges: decide every single case they get; decision should be based on written rules; and (last but not least) decision should be fair and just. 1 But what is praxis's reality, would judicial work be this simple or not? It is well advised to think over the problem and to concentrate on the quality of reasoning which has become an accentuated requirement in the past years. The purpose of this research project was to properly answer a difficult question-what is expected from judicial reasoning? Are there any aspects, standards, or scales, which can highlight and measure the quality of judges' work? There are some measuring methods from the legal philosophy tradition, e.g., there are great maxims in Roman law, such as ius est ars boni et aequi, summum ius summa iniuria, etc. Legal culture has also created several famous role-models in connection with judges' reasoning methods; these famous descriptions consist of judges who represent the main features of an ideal decision-maker. 2
Judges and Juries: Separate Moments in the Same Phenomenon
Law and Inequality, 1986
Special thanks to Frances Nash for her comments and editorial suggestions in turning this manuscript into something resembling English. To think we were all educated at the same university. We would also like to thank those colleagues and teachers cited in the text for their comments and suggestions.
Letting the Field Show us the Way – a Mixed Methodology to Understand Judicial Decision Making
International Journal of Applied Psychology, 2012
The purpose of this article is to describe the methodology used in three studies to obtain data fro m a Portuguese Criminal Court in order to undertake a psychological analysis of judicial decision-making in the criminal justice system to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. Because information about the Portuguese criminal system is scarce, the design and definit ion of the studies was adapted fro m literature and our experience derived fro m the contact with the field. We exp lain how this methodology arose, particularly how it was designed and formulated through contact with the field and with the actors-the judges-in the decision making process that we were studying. This approximated an ethnographic type of approach to reality. We focused on criminal court judges as the starting point and source of our data.
Empirically Investigating Judicial Emotion
Oñati Socio-legal Series, 2019
The empirical study of judicial emotion has enormous but largely untapped potential to illuminate a previously underexplored aspect of judging, its processes, outputs, and impacts. After defining judicial emotion, this article proposes a theoretical taxonomy of approaches to its empirical exploration. It then presents and analyses extant examples of such research, with a focus on how the questions they ask fit within the taxonomy and the methods they use to answer those questions. It concludes by identifying areas for growth in the disciplined, data-based exploration of the many facets of judicial emotion. El estudio empírico de las emociones en la judicatura tiene un potencial enorme, pero poco explorado, para arrojar luz sobre un aspecto de la profesión judicial poco explorado previamente, sus procesos, resultados y efectos. Tras definir la emoción judicial, el artículo propone una taxonomía teórica de abordajes a su estudio empírico. Después, presenta y analiza ejemplos existente...
Cognitive Bias Affecting Decision-Making in the Legal Process
2021
Several empirical research studies have shown that cognitive bias can unconsciously distort inferences and interpretations made by judges either at the hearing, ruling or sentencing stage of a court trial and this may result in miscarriages of justice. This article examines how cognitive heuristics affects judicial decision-making with seven common manifestations of heuristics such as availability heuristics, confirmation bias, egocentric bias, anchoring, hindsight bias, framing and representativeness. This article contends that the different manifestations of heuristics pose a potentially serious risk to the quality and objectivity of any criminal case, despite the professional legal training and experience of judges and magistrates. Therefore, suggestions on how best to avoid and minimise the effects of cognitive heuristics, especially within South African courts are proffered. These include creating awareness raising, cross-examination and replacement.
The judge: a new actor in the political landscape
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2020
As is the case for other research fields, both the judicial system and the actors performing its numerous functions can be observed from different perspectives and, to a certain extent, these may complement one another. Although legal scholars were the first to engage in this field-practically colonizing it for some time-the social scientists who came later developed an increasingly rich toolbox that now includes a variety of methods, theories and concepts progressively devised to approach the multifaceted world of justice. Our attention will focus more closely, though not exclusively, on the latter framework. In the European context, academic lawyers have traditionally cultivated the study of courts, judicial procedures and jurisprudence, mostly favoring a legal dimension. The formal rules that establish how the system should operate and how the judiciary should act are doubtless fundamental components of the administration of justice insofar as they provide valuable information that scholars cannot neglect whatever their perspective. Yet we know that implementing rules is neither a simple nor an obvious process. Laws do not always generate the expected outcomes owing to a host of factors, ranging from the nature of the issues to be addressed to the complexity of bureaucratic machineries. Such factors may also produce distorting or undesirable effects in implementation and laws may even remain totally or partially unenforced (Howlett and Ramesh 1995). To describe how judicial institutions work in practice, it is thus necessary to look beyond the normative dimension. Appropriate instruments are, therefore, required to investigate both sides of these institutions: how actual behavior develops, and interactions within this environment. This approach enables us to present an image of justice not solely confined to formal data. With this aim, contributions from other scientific fields have multiplied since the middle of the past century, first in the United States and later in Europe. All of them fall within the extended family of social sciences. Although they differ greatly, these studies generally tend to give priority to the operational