Full Disclosure: Cognitive Bias, Informants, and Search Warrant Scrutiny

This article posits that cognitive biases play a significant role in the gap between the rhetoric regarding Fourth Amendment protection and actual practices regarding search warrant scrutiny, particularly for search warrants based on informants’ tips. Specifically, this article examines the ways in which implicit bias, tunnel vision, priming, and hindsight bias can affect search warrants. These biases can affect each stage of the search warrant process, including targeting decisions, the drafting process, the magistrate’s decision whether to grant the warrant, and post-search review by trial and appellate courts. These biases create room for informant falsehoods to go unchecked, with a likely disproportionate effect on minority communities. To address these effects, the article proposes a number of interconnected solutions, all revolving around the idea of full disclosure. The article proposes that police officers, magistrates, and judges all receive education about cognitive biases generally and the value of meaningful judicial review of warrants for combatting these biases. To facilitate this review, police should use a checklist when preparing search warrant applications to help them identify and disclose all relevant information. The article then suggests changes for judicial review of challenges to the accuracy and completeness of search warrant information. These revised standards should incentivize providing full disclosure and to ensure meaningful post-search review of magistrates’ decisions

Engaging First-Year Students through Pro Bono Collaborations in Legal Writing

This article recommends developing assignments for first-year legal writing courses through collaborations with legal services organizations. The article stems from and describes such ongoing projects at Seattle University School of Law, where several hundred first-year law students have worked on such projects so far. We have partnered with lawyers at organizations like the National Employment Law Project, the ACLU of Washington, and Northwest Justice Project to come up with live issues that they would like to have researched, and they received the best student work product from each class. The partner organizations have used the students’ work in several ways, including bringing successful impact litigation, preparing amicus briefs, and lobbying for legislative changes. These projects have increased our students’ understanding of the importance of legal research and writing, have motivated our students to improve their work product, and have helped the students gain a different perspective than they often see within the first-year curriculum. The article contextualizes these projects within the traditional legal writing curriculum and the Carnegie Report’s recommendations that law schools join lawyering professionalism and legal analysis from the beginning of law school. The article also draws on research into student engagement, including the Law School Survey of Student Engagement. The article discusses the literature regarding somewhat similar collaboration between legal writing and clinical faculty within the law school; these projects are complementary, but they have fewer timing challenges, are less resource-intensive for the law school, and they provide an opportunity to connect the law school with lawyers from community partner organizations. Finally, the article offers some concrete practical solutions to potential challenges in implementing these projects, including making sure that core legal writing objectives are met through the projects and how to teach the projects effectively to first-year students

Full Disclosure: Cognitive Bias, Informants, and Search Warrant Scrutiny

This article posits that cognitive biases play a significant role in the gap between the rhetoric regarding Fourth Amendment protection and actual practices regarding search warrant scrutiny, particularly for search warrants based on informants’ tips. Specifically, this article examines the ways in which implicit bias, tunnel vision, priming, and hindsight bias can affect search warrants. These biases can affect each stage of the search warrant process, including targeting decisions, the drafting process, the magistrate’s decision whether to grant the warrant, and post-search review by trial and appellate courts. These biases create room for informant falsehoods to go unchecked, with a likely disproportionate effect on minority communities. To address these effects, the article proposes a number of interconnected solutions, all revolving around the idea of full disclosure. The article proposes that police officers, magistrates, and judges all receive education about cognitive biases generally and the value of meaningful judicial review of warrants for combatting these biases. To facilitate this review, police should use a checklist when preparing search warrant applications to help them identify and disclose all relevant information. The article then suggests changes for judicial review of challenges to the accuracy and completeness of search warrant information. These revised standards should incentivize providing full disclosure and to ensure meaningful post-search review of magistrates’ decisions

Mitigating Foul Blows

For nearly eighty years, courts have offered stirring rhetoric about how prosecutors must not strike foul blows in pursuit of convictions. Yet while appellate courts are often quick to condemn prosecutorial trial misconduct, they rarely provide any meaningful remedy. Instead, courts routinely affirm convictions, relying on defense counsel\u27s failure to object or concluding that the misconduct was merely harmless error. Jerome Frank summed up the consequences of this dichotomy best when he noted that the courts\u27 attitude of helpless piety in prosecutorial misconduct cases breeds a deplorably cynical attitude toward the judiciary. Cognitive bias research illuminates the reasons for, and solutions to, the gap between rhetoric and reality in prosecutorial misconduct cases. This article is the first to explore theories of cognition that help explain the frequency of prosecutorial misconduct and the ways that it likely affects jurors and reviewing judges more than they realize. As a result, the article advocates for sweeping changes to the doctrine of harmless error and modest changes to the doctrine of plain error as applied in prosecutorial misconduct cases. These solutions will help courts abandon their attitude of helpless piety, clarify the currently ambiguous law on what behavior constitutes prosecutorial misconduct, encourage defense counsel to raise timely objections to misconduct, and reverse convictions when misconduct may well have affected the outcome of the case but affirm when the misconduct was trivial

It’s not the model that doesn’t fit, it’s the controller! The role of cognitive skills in understanding the links between natural mapping, performance, and enjoyment of console video games

This study examines differences in performance, frustration, and game ratings of individuals playing first person shooter video games using two different controllers (motion controller and a traditional, pushbutton controller) in a within-subjects, randomized order design. Structural equation modeling was used to demonstrate that cognitive skills such as mental rotation ability and eye/hand coordination predicted performance for both controllers, but the motion control was significantly more frustrating. Moreover, increased performance was only related to game ratings for the traditional controller input. We interpret these data as evidence that, contrary to the assumption that motion controlled interfaces are more naturally mapped than traditional push-button controllers, the traditional controller was more naturally mapped as an interface for gameplay

A Darker Ignorance: C. S. Lewis and the Nature of the Fall

Starting with a study of the character of Susan in The Last Battle, examines Lewis’s views on innocence, sin, and maturity. Considers evidence from the Perelandra cycle and discusses Phillip Pullman’s criticism of Lewis