Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such "altruistic punishment" may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups. Thus, applying such models to the evolu...

The U.S. Supreme Court has made a number of recent rulings in regard to the death penalty that will likely have the effec: sf increasing the use of psychiatry during the trial and sentencing process in capital cases. Any such changes are bound to increase the number of ethical dilemmas faced by psychiatrists involved in such work. The rulings affecting psychiatry include: (1) The Eighth Amendme...

Previous research has found that death qualification impacts jurors' receptiveness to aggravating and mitigating circumstances (e.g., J. Luginbuhl & K. Middendorf, 1988). However, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether death qualification affects jurors' endorsements of aggravating and mitigating circumstances when Witt, rather than Witherspoon, is the legal standard for death qua...

■ Abstract The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the application of empirical economic approaches to the study of crime and the criminal justice system. Much of this research has emphasized identifying causal impacts, as opposed to correlations. These studies have generally found that increases in police and greater incarceration lead to reduced crime. The death penalty, as currently use...

The death penalty remains an intensely divisive topic in American society. Recently, there has been a series of cases, first involving defendants with mental retardation and more recently involving juveniles, in which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled by a five-to-four margin that the death penalty in both these classes violates the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment...

Predictions of dangerousness, violence, and recidivism continue to play an ever-growing role in the legal system. These psycho-legal assessments determine a myriad of legal outcomes including, but not limited to, probation status (i.e., prediction of recidivism), civil commitment (i.e., prediction of danger to self or others), psychotherapist liability under a Tarasoff duty (i.e., prediction of...

These seminar notes report preliminary findings from a survey run in July 1998 in France on individual attitudes toward income inequality. The main finding is that people simply do not seem to disagree very much about the ideal pay scale and income ratios across individuals. Low-income individuals, as well as left-wing voters, do indeed tend to favor a more compressed income distribution than h...

I further like the boldness of Professor Lee’s strategy. The data presented by Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Roper v. Simmons would seem to be special in purporting to show a literally unanimous, worldwide rejection of the juvenile death penalty outside of the United States. 2 If even such a total worldwide consensus could be shown to lack instructiveness when applying the Eighth A...

SummaryOngoing political controversies around the world exemplify a long-standing and widespread preoccupation with the acceptability of homosexuality. Nonheterosexual people have seen dramatic surges both in their rights and in positive public opinion in many Western countries. In contrast, in much of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Oceania, and parts of Asia, homosexual behavior remai...