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Judicial opinion

About: Judicial opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5300 publications have been published within this topic receiving 64803 citations.


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TL;DR: In this paper, the JAMA Model and Narrative Interpretation Patterns are used to illustrate the probability of the Jama murder and inquiry, and to illustrate another kind of probability or improbability, i.e., what is improbable about the Jama story is actually a given.
Abstract: In judicial decision making, the doctrine of chances takes explicitly into account the odds. There is more to forensic statistics, as well as various probabilistic approaches, which taken together form the object of an enduring controversy in the scholarship of legal evidence. In this paper, I reconsider the circumstances of the Jama murder and inquiry (dealt with in Part I of this paper: 'The JAMA Model and Narrative Interpretation Patterns'), to illustrate yet another kind of probability or improbability. What is improbable about the Jama story is actually a given, which contributes in terms of dramatic underlining. In literary theory, concepts of narratives being probable or improbable date back from the eighteenth century, when both prescientific and scientific probability were infiltrating several domains, including law. An understanding of such a backdrop throughout the history of ideas is, I claim, necessary for Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers who may be tempted to apply statistical method...

17 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In a recent survey of the literature reporting the reactions of police, school teachers, draft board members, and the like to various Supreme Court decisions, one is left with the common sense truism that patterns of compliance and defiance with the Supreme Court vary-from decision to decision, from community to community, and from individual to individual as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Only a few years ago it was customary and appropriate to begin an essay on Supreme Court efficacy by lamenting the paucity of empirical studies dealing with this problem. Such an introduction is no longer in order, since we have recently witnessed a flourishing of research on the actual consequences of judicial decisions. Both the appearance of at least one book of readings on Supreme Court impact (Becker, 1969) and the focusing of panels around this topic at political science conventions are indications of the emergence of "legal impact" as a significant field of scholarly inquiry. Ironically, however, the proliferation of impact studies has muddled our understanding of judicial effectiveness as much as it has clarified it. After surveying the literature reporting the reactions of police, school teachers, draft board members, and the like to various Supreme Court decisions, one is bewildered if he attempts to relate, reconcile, or "propositionalize" the hodgepodge of findings that has accrued. We are left with the common sense truism that patterns of compliance and defiance with the Supreme Court vary-from decision to decision, from community to community, and from individual to individual. Such a trivial conclusion could have been reached by anyone who simply reads Time Magazine and notes, say, the continuation of police harassment of minorities and the decline of sex censorship.

17 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the legitimacy of the judicial system requires that the rule of law be above the whims of the individual personalities who happen to occupy positions on the Supreme Court at any given time.
Abstract: Judges are “liars.” They “routinely engage in delusion.” They occupy a paradoxical position in this world, one in which their function requires them to make law, while their legitimacy depends on the fiction that they interpret law. It is a strange fiction, but it is a necessary one. The legitimacy of the judicial system requires that the rule of law be above the whims of the individual personalities who happen to occupy positions on the Supreme Court at any given time. Rather, the rule of law must be grounded in objective analysis and immutable logic, reasoning that does not change with the changing of personnel. Otherwise, there would be no reason to accept the decisions of the Court as the governing framework for our society. Judges sustain the fiction that they interpret law, but never create it, by adhering to the doctrine of stare decisis. Stare decisis states that judicial decisionmaking should adhere to precedent. Precedent provides a source external to the judges’ individual opinions that legitimizes their reasoning, supplying ready evidence that judicial decisions are based on more than individual whim. After all, there is a certain amount of security in trusting precedent. Assuming that judges in a series of decisions have conducted independent analyses to confirm their predecessors’ views, and that such a

17 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Analysis of courtroom testimony heard in London's Central Criminal Court in the 10 years following the McNaughtan acquittal (1843) reveals the effort of medical witnesses to establish a distinctive and essential voice in the Victorian insanity trial.
Abstract: Analysis of courtroom testimony heard in London's Central Criminal Court in the 10 years following the McNaughtan acquittal (1843) reveals the effort of medical witnesses to establish a distinctive and essential voice in the Victorian insanity trial. Three trials that illustrate this effort are examined for the manner in which practitioners of mental medicine distinguished their opinion from the layperson's fact and, in the process, engaged pivotal issues for the determination of criminal responsibility. Their testimony and the attorneys' questions that elicited it suggest that whatever reliance the judiciary might have placed on the McNaughtan Rules to confine testimony to the defendant's capacity to "know fight from wrong," medical witnesses devised ways to circumvent and indeed dismiss the relevance of this particular inquiry. he difference between asking a witness, "Did the boy not tell you something about his grandfather?" and "Do you consider when he did this, he did not know that poisoning his grandfather was a wrong act?" is the difference between asking a witness to report a fact and asking him to deliver an opinion. Although all witnesses in Anglo-American jurisprudence are ostensibly limited to reporting only their direct sensory perceptions to the court, there exists a class of witnesses entitled to draw inferences, form opinions, and advise the jury in matters thought to be beyond the ken of the ordinary citizen. The only skill required to answer the first question is the possession of auditory sensation: What was it the witness actually heard?1 The second question asks for the most subtle of judgments: an opinion that the defendant could commit an atrocious crime without knowing that committing it would be wrong. What does the phrasing of this question-and indeed the fact that it was asked at all-suggest about the common law's willingness to entertain a body of opinion that claimed unique insight into the mind of the mad? Both questions cited above are found in an 1848 insanity trial heard at the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court. That a self-proclaimed expert in mental medicine appeared in court to answer questions about mental derangement was not a novel occurrence. Physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries had been appearing in English courts to comment on the medical features of insanity since at least 1760. And it was hardly unusual for the defendant's mental derangement to be associated with physical pathology, as would be the case with the youthful poisoner. Neighbors, lovers, and co-workers of the allegedly insane routinely commented on physiological anomalies ranging from head wounds to fevers, war wounds to riding accidents, head sores to fits. What would set mid-Victorian insanity trials apart was the medical witness's venturing into the moral consequence of such physical ailments. In the case cited above, the young defendant's ringworm had purportedly penetrated his brain, not only driving him mad but "prevent[ing] him from distinguishing right from wrong." To be sure, laypersons were in the habit of associating physical anomalies with aberrant behavior, but they confined their testimony to the presence of insanity. The emerging specialist in mental medicine, in contrast, endeavored to construct a more ambitious connection, one that speculated on the implications of physical and moral lesions for the mental contemplation of a crime. This effort to delve into the mental consequence of disease was one way the medical specialist distinguished his testimony from the layperson's. A second, and more consequential, undertaking was his challenge of the juror's belief that there was anything self-evident in discovering madness. By questioning the conventional signs and assumed meanings of bizarre action, the medical witness presented a construction of nonintentional behavior that would eventually bring him into direct conflict with the law's criterion for assigning criminal responsibility. …

17 citations

01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: This paper examined the readability of all state supreme court search and seizure decisions from 2000-2010 and assessed the hypothesis that, just as judicial elections increase judges' propensity to follow public opinion when voting on the merits of a case, the presence of these retention institutions also provides incentives for judges to justify their opinions in language their constituents can readily understand.
Abstract: How do judicial elections affect the propensity of judges to write opinions that are understandable to the public? Drawing on a growing literature that analyzes the content of judicial opinions computationally, I examine the readability of all state supreme court search and seizure decisions from 2000-2010. I assess the hypothesis that, just as judicial elections increase judges’ propensities to follow public opinion when voting on the merits of a case, the presence of these retention institutions also provides incentives for judges to justify their opinions in language that their constituents can readily understand. However, when elected judges fear a difficult path to retention, they tend to write opinions that are more difficult for the average constituent to understand.

17 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202314
202242
202196
2020160
2019174
2018176