We propose that institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court can lead individuals to update their perceptions of social norms, in contrast to the mixed evidence on whether institutions shape individuals' personal opinions. We studied reactions to the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. In a controlled experimental setting, we found that a favorable ruling, when pre...

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court was once again asked to determine if the execution of a juvenile, aged 16 or 17 years at the time of the offense, represents cruel and unusual punishment. In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Supreme Court of Missouri to overturn the death penalty of Christopher Simmons and held that the execution of juvenile...

Under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Stanford v. Kentucky, the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishments clause does not shield minors 16 or 17 years of age from the death penalty. Holding, astonishingly, that Stanford is no longer the law of the land, the Missouri Supreme Court recently reversed the death sentence of a 17-year-old murderer in Simmons v. Roper. The U.S. Suprem...

1 The first section of a three-part article on Compstat, an information-driven managerial process, examines four crime-reduction principles that form the basis of the technique. Agencies must ensure that they are prepared to handle situations involving officers in crisis. 26 Eight Supreme Court decisions of particular importance to law enforcement are summarized. Contributors' opinions and stat...

Although Medicaid is regarded as a federal entitlement program, nowhere does the Medicaid statute explicitly recognize a federal right of action to enforce recipients' rights. Arguably, the Supreme Court, rather than Congress, first recognized the right of Medicaid recipients to protection of federal law. A controversial 2001 federal court decision, however, called into question the continuing ...

Using a pooled data set consisting of 20 annual observations on each of eleven major industry groups, I estimate the effects of overtime pay regulation on weekly work schedules. After controlling for workweek trends within industries, the sharp expansions in overtime pay coverage resulting from legislative amendments and Supreme Court decisions produced no discernible impact on overtime hours. ...

The focus of this research is in the area of the United States death penalty. More specifically, it examines the use of the felony murder rule and the law of parties at both federal and state level. These areas are considered in light of the 8th Amendment as according to the interpretations of the United States Supreme Court. The approach taken in this article is two dimensional: firstly it con...

To what extent is criminal behavior in adolescence attributable to risk appraisal? Using two large cross-sectional samples (N = 929, age range: 10-30 years; and N = 1,357, age range: 12-24 years), we examine whether (a) reward bias in risk appraisal is more prominent in adolescence and (b) the association between risk appraisal and criminal behavior is stronger during adolescence than at other ...

Studying examples of expert case-based adaptation could advance computational modeling but only if the examples can be succinctly represented and reliably interpreted. Supreme Court justices pose hypothetical cases, often adapting precedents, to evaluate if a proposed rule for deciding a problem needs to be adapted. This paper describes a diagrammatic representation of adaptive reasoning with h...