The Supreme Court's Daubert trilogy places judges in the unenviable position of assessing the reliability of often unfamiliar and complex scientific expert testimony. Over the past decade, scholars have therefore explored various ways of helping judges with their new gatekeeping responsibilities. Unfortunately, the two dominant approaches, which focus on doctrinal tests and external assistance ...

A modest, but growing, body of case law is developing around the (non-)treatment of patients in the minimally conscious state. We sought to explore the approaches that the courts take to these decisions. Using the results of a qualitative analysis, we identify five key features of the rulings to date. First, the judges appear keen to frame the cases in such a way that these are rightly matters ...

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the US jury system needs to be ‘fixed.’ Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show that there are large differences in mean awards and win rates across juries and judges. But if the type...

Most scholars focus on whether the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines effectively constrain judges or result in disparate decisions based on a court’s or defendant’s location. With few exceptions, studies of the effect of judicial attributes on federal-district-court-sentencing cases have been stymied by the United States Sentencing Commission’s refusal to release judges’ names in their databases of se...

The sentencing of young people convicted of sexual violence presents a dilemma: how to reconcile the seriousness of the offence and the youthfulness of the offender? And how to censure these offences and stress their seriousness without imposing penalties that are too harsh? The literature suggests that adult sex offenders, especially those who abuse children, are dealt with in an increasingly ...

Stephen Breyer, a judge of the US Supreme Court, wrote some fifteen years ago: »Scientific issues permeate the law (...). The law must seek decisions that fall within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge and approximately reflect the scientific state of the art (...). I believe that in this age of science we must build legal foundations that are sound in science as well as in law. S...

Because law enforcement officers must justify searches and seizures in response to motions to suppress evidence,! judges ruling upon these motions often must evaluate the credibility of the officers' testimony. This inquiry can involve one or more of three interrelated questions: Did the facts known to the officer justify the intrusion? Was the officer's purpose in conducting the search and sei...

Abstract We design, describe and implement a statistical engine to analyze the performance of gymnastics judges with three objectives: (1) provide constructive feedback judges, executive committees national federations; (2) assign best most important competitions; (3) detect bias persistent misjudging. Judging routine is random process, we model this process using heteroscedastic variables. The...

In Arizona v. Fulminante (1991), the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for appellate judges to conduct a harmless error analysis of erroneously admitted, coerced confessions. In this study, 132 judges from three states read a murder case summary, evaluated the defendant's guilt, assessed the voluntariness of his confession, and responded to implicit and explicit measures of harmless error. Res...