Full Description
Over the years, psychologists have devoted uncountable hours to learning how human beings make judgments and decisions. As much progress as scholars have made in explaining what judges do over the past few decades, there remains a certain lack of depth to our understanding. Even where scholars can make consensual and successful predictions of a judge's behavior, they will often disagree sharply about exactly what happens in the judge's mind to generate the predicted result.
This volume of essays examines the psychological processes that underlie judicial decision making. The first section of the book takes as its starting point the fact that judges make many of the same judgments and decisions that ordinary people make and considers how our knowledge about judgment and decision-making in general applies to the case of legal judges. In the second section, chapters focus on the specific tasks that judges perform within a unique social setting and examine the expertise and particular modes of reasoning that judges develop to deal with their tasks in this unique setting. Finally, the third section raises questions about whether and how we can evaluate judicial performance, with implications for the possibility of improving judging through the selection and training of judges and structuring of judicial institutions. Together the essays apply a wide range of psychological insights to help us better understand how judges make decisions and to open new avenues of inquiry into the influences on judicial behavior.
Contents
Introduction
David Klein
Part I: Judges and Human Behavior
Motivation and Judicial Behavior: Expanding the Scope of Inquiry
Lawrence Baum
Multiple Constraint Satisfaction in Judging
Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Robert J. MacCoun, and John M. Darley
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Models of Judicial Reasoning
Brandon L. Bartels
Persuasion in the Decision Making of U.S. Supreme Court Justices
Lawrence S. Wrightsman
Judges as Members of Small Groups
Wendy L. Martinek
The Supreme Court, Social Psychology, and Group Formation
Neal Devins and Will Federspiel
Part II: Judging as Specialized Activity
Is There a Psychology of Judging?
Frederick Schauer
Features of Judicial Reasoning
Emily Sherwin
In Praise of Pedantic Eclecticism: Pitfalls and Opportunities in the Psychology of Judging
Dan Simon
Judges, Expertise, and Analogy
Barbara A. Spellman
Thresholds For Action in Judicial Decisions
Len Dalgleish, James Shanteau and April Park
Every Jury Trial Is a Bench Trial: Judicial Engineering of Jury Disputes
C. K. Rowland, Tina Traficanti, and Erin Vernon
Searching for Constraint in Legal Decision Making
Eileen Braman
Part III: Evaluating and Improving Judging
Evaluating Judges
Gregory Mitchell
Defining Good Judging
Andrew J. Wistrich
Expertise of Court Judges
James Shanteau and Len Dalgleish
Cognitive Style and Judging
Gregory Mitchell and Philip E. Tetlock
Building a Better Judiciary
Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry
References
