We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The...

Interest is being shown in a componential analysis of performance on declarative memory tasks that distinguishes two different kinds of access to stored memories, recollection and familiarity. From a developmental perspective, it has been hypothesized that recollection emerges later and shows more developmental changes than familiarity. Nevertheless, the contribution of recollection and familia...

Consider a type of argument that is familiar in legal scholarship, such a commonplace in fact that its structure may lurk unnoticed in the background by the reader. The argument proceeds like this: (1) Here is some legal doctrine or rule; (2) courts and scholars (or at least my rivals) tend to think that its point, rationale, purpose, or function is X—that is, the doctrine is “all about” X; (3)...

Current theories postulate that recognition memory can be supported by two independent processes: recollection (i.e. vivid memory for an item and the contextual details surrounding it) versus familiarity (i.e. the mere sense that an item is old). There is conflicting evidence on whether recognition memory is impaired in Parkinson's disease, perhaps because few studies have separated recollectio...

Numerous studies have identified brain regions where activity is consistently correlated with the retrieval (recollection) of qualitative episodic information. This 'core recollection network' can be contrasted with regions where activity differs according to the contents of retrieval. The present study used high-resolution fMRI to investigate whether these putatively-distinct retrieval process...

A recent consensus has emerged within peace operations doctrine validating “robust” or “assertive” peacekeeping as an effective mechanism to intervene in complex and volatile intrastate conflicts. The assertion of the validity of “robust peacekeeping” is problematic due to a lack of empirical evidence supporting the application of this management tool. Yet the similarity between the context and...

The state action doctrine receives relatively little attention in the Federal Trade Commission/Department of Justice 2004 report on competition in the health care sector. Not surprisingly, the report focuses primarily on urging states to reconsider specific laws that tend to restrict competition in health care markets but that are clearly shielded by the state action doctrine. Relatively little...

A key feature of human recollection is the ability to remember details of the context in which events were experienced, as well as details of the events themselves. Previous studies have implicated a number of regions of prefrontal cortex in contextual recollection, but the role of anterior prefrontal cortex has so far resisted detailed characterization. We used event-related functional MRI (fM...