This article examines the behavioral analysis of law, meaning the application of empirical behavioral evidence to legal analysis, which has become increasingly popular in legal scholarship in recent years. Following the introduction in Part I, this Article highlights four central propositions on the subject. First, Part II asserts that the efficacy of the law often depends on its accounting for...

Data usage is of great concern for a user owning the data. Users want assurance that their personal data will be fairly used for the purposes for which they have provided their consent. Moreover, they should be able to withdraw their consent once they want. Actually, consent is captured as a matter of legal record that can be used as legal evidence. It restricts the use and dissemination of inf...

The impact that the perceived violence of a crime has on jury decision making has received much controversy lately. Violence may affect juries by how it is presented, as in the case of graphic evidence; its evidentiary purpose, as in establishing a history of violence in domestic abuse cases; and in sentencing, when the question of the heinousness of the crime is raised. Many judicial experts a...

Assumptions regarding the harmful effects of exposure to virtual child pornography are tested in a laboratory experiment. Based on a lexical decision-making task, participants exposed to sexually explicit depictions of females who appear to be minors (“barely legal” pornography) were faster to recognize sexual words after being primed with neutral depictions of girls compared to participants wh...

Aim Two major challenges in legal decision making arise from the usually high complexity of the cases and from the high level of uncertainty caused by incomplete or missing information. In most cases it is not possible to apply Bayesian probability calculus, and legal standards prohibit the application of fast-and-frugal heuristics. Based on a connectionist approach to decision making, Simon (2...

Causation looms large in legal and moral reasoning. People construct causal models of the social and physical world to understand what has happened, how and why, and to allocate responsibility and blame. This chapter explores people’s commonsense notion of causation, and shows how it underpins moral and legal judgments. As a guiding framework it uses the causal model framework (Pearl, 2000) roo...

Attackers tend to use complex techniques such as combining multi-step, multi-stage attack with anti-forensic tools to make it difficult to find incriminating evidence and reconstruct attack scenarios that can stand up to the expected level of evidence admissibility in a court of law. As a solution, we propose to integrate the legal aspects of evidence correlation into a Prolog based reasoner to...

Forensic inferential reasoning is a “fact-finding” journey for crime investigation and evidence presentation. In complex legal practices involving various forms of evidence, conventional decision making processes based on human intuition and piece-to-piece evidence explanation often fail to reconstruct meaningful and convincing legal hypothesis. It is necessary to develop logical system for evi...

Social scientists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, it has been argued, lacked effective legal mechanisms for contract enforcement and instead relied on informal sanctions based on collective ostracism within an exclusive coalition. We show that this claim is untenable. Not a single empirical example adduced as evidence of the putative coaliti...

In this review evidence on the impact of introducing or lowering legal blood alcohol limits on traffic safety measures is examined. There is substantial variability in the types and rigour of methods used to evaluate these legislative measures, and thus not surprisingly there is variability in the results observed. In most but not all cases where an evaluation of an introduced or lowered legal ...