Professor Avani Mehta Sood (ams9262@nyu.edu)
*The Colloquium will meet weekly on Mondays, from 4:45–6:45pm, in Furman Hall 212.
| Date | Speaker / Title | Abstract |
|---|---|---|
| March 17 | Tess Wilkinson-Ryan “Contracts for Everyone” | The architects of American contract law—judges, lawyers, regulators and academics—know a lot about what litigated deals look like, but almost nothing about the contracting of ordinary people. This Article offers a wide-ranging empirical account of how non-elites interact with commercial law. It catalogs contract experiences and attitudes with an in-depth survey of a representative sample of thousands of Americans, asking about deals from home to work and all the digital places in between. We identify systematic patterns of contracting: “Old World” contracts—property contracts, high-dollar loans, sales of goods—“Real World” contracts—or the transactions people are stuck with to get by—and “New World” contracts—crypto, gig work, and other digital deals. Demographic characteristics like race, gender, age and wealth interact with these categories in expected and unexpected ways. Armed with this new map of contracting experiences, we report novel results suggesting that contract experience affects judgments and attitudes about what contract law means. Overall, we aim to reset the empirical study of contract on a firmer and more inclusive foundation by demystifying the contracting lives of people who don’t end up in court and are not part of commercial networks. That is: to reorient the theoretical core and pedagogical materials that constitute the subject to reach beyond weird, litigated, contracts and toward ones that are common. |
| March 31 | Jennifer Robbennolt “Settlementality” | Is settlement of civil litigation good or bad for the legal system? Should we have more or less of it? Should settlement have a private or public purpose? Legal scholars and lawyers have considered these questions for decades, but very little is known about the views of ordinary people. This is particularly surprising for a process that is at the heart of the legal system. Most U.S. litigation settles, but we know very little about public opinions of settlement. This Article reports results from a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults. In earlier work, we analyzed what these respondents knew about civil settlement and their basic understandings of the role of contract and court. This Article reports what respondents thought settlement should look like. Respondents indicated, for example, the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements like these: “A settlement between two parties is nobody’s business but their own.” “Settling parties are more interested in money than justice.” Our findings convey nuanced lay intuitions about civil settlement, including mixed views about secrecy and settlements, and a tendency to want settling defendants to admit fault and apologize. We also discover that a striking number of lay observers prefer private resolution through contract to oversight by judges. Indeed, a considerable majority thought that at least 75% of disputes would be resolved by settlement in an ideal world, with 100% being the most common choice. The view that more cases should settle was both striking and complicated, highlighting the tension between private resolution of disputes and the public function of litigation and courts |
| April 7 | Owen Jones “Law and Neuroscience: A Selection of Interdisciplinary Brain-Scanning Experiments” | This talk will provide an overview of key developments at the intersection of law and neuroscience. After a very short and accessible introduction to one of the key brain-scanning technologies – functional magnetic resonance imaging – I’ll provide a brief overview of a number of published experiments of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience (www.lawneuro.org), which I created and direct. The experiments addressed issues involving, among other things: the detection of mens rea; the detection of autobiographical memories; the operation of young-adult brains; attempts to use brain-scans to detect lies; and how brains work when making liability and punishment decisions. Throughout, we’ll be considering both the potential promise of neuroscience for law, and several of the important limitations on current neuroscience techniques and interpretations. |
| April 14 | Shari Seidman Diamond “Presiding Jurors and Big Talkers” | The jury is a democratic institution whose members are officially entitled to equal status in their role as jurors. Yet juries, like other decision-making groups, typically show unequal participation and the presiding juror is frequently described as occupying an unduly dominant role during deliberations. Some scholars have suggested that the choice of the presiding juror should not be left to the jurors themselves. Indeed, in New York state courts, the first seated juror becomes the presiding juror. This close study of the deliberations of 50 real civil juries allowed us to examine the characteristics and behavior of the jurors during their deliberations in a system in which jurors select their own presiding juror. Although presiding jurors participated more heavily than the average juror, in the majority of cases someone other than the presiding juror was the biggest talker. Thus, we compared the characteristics and behavior of both the presiding jurors and biggest talkers with the characteristics and behavior of the other jurors. The results suggest some room for improvement to optimize deliberations, but not grounds for a takeover by the legal system. |
| April 21 | Terry Maroney “What Judges Feel: How Emotions Shape Justice” | I will present several draft chapters from my forthcoming book, What Judges Feel: How Emotions Shape Justice (Princeton University Press). Based in a decade of empirical research—interviews, surveys, and immersion—with sitting judges from the federal and state-court benches, and grounded in insights from the affective sciences, the book examines how judges experience and manage emotion in the course of their work. Emotion is an ever-present element of judicial work. Judges’ skill in managing their emotions, as well as those of others, facilitates their ability to make court users feel heard and respected—in other words, to deliver procedural justice. Judges’ emotional investment in their work can also affect substantive justice—for example, by making some available outcomes feel either necessary or impossible. Finally, emotional experiences and their management are key drivers of stress, burnout, and cynicism, but also of satisfaction, pride, and a sense of meaning. To truly know our judges, we need to know not just how they think but what they feel. |
| April 28 | Avani Mehta Sood “Grudging Acquittals and Biased Lenity: Effects of Verdict Format in Criminal Cases” | Forthcoming |