Lawyers on Trial: Juror Hostility to Defendants in Legal Malpractice Trials

In contrast to medical malpractice, legal malpractice is a phenomenon that has attracted little attention from empirically-oriented scholars. This paper is part of a larger study of legal malpractice claiming and litigation. Given the evidence on the frequency of legal malpractice claims, there are surprisingly few legal malpractice cases that result in jury verdicts. There are many possible explanations for this, one of which reflects the perception that lawyers are held in such low esteem by potential jurors that they risk harsh treatment by jurors when they are defendants in legal malpractice trials. Because we could find no empirical evidence that that either supported or rejected the reality of this perception, we designed a simple jury simulation experiment to test this as an hypothesis. Using three different case scenarios, each in two forms (one set within a legal malpractice framework and one outside legal malpractice), we found support for the hypothesis in only one of the three scenarios and even there the effects were at best modest. These results held up controlling for other possible factors that might influence juror responses to the case scenarios

An Exploration of “Non-Economic” Damages in Civil Jury Awards

Using three primary data sources plus three supplemental sources discussed in an appendix, this paper examines how well non-economic damages could be predicted by economic damages and at how the ratio of non-economic damages to economic damages changed as the magnitude of the economic damages awarded by juries increased. We found a mixture of consistent and inconsistent patterns across our various datasets. One fairly consistent pattern was the tendency for the ratio of non-economic to economic damages to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. Moreover, the variability of the ratio also tended to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. We found less consistency in our simple regression models where we predicted the log of noneconomic damages from the log of economic damages. In all of those models, the slopes of the fitted line were positive, but the slopes and the measures of fit (r2) varied from dataset to dataset, and among type of case within those datasets with multiple case types. Also, where we had the same type of case across datasets, we found variation in the fit and slope. With two of the datasets we were able to extend our regression models with regard to medical malpractice cases. Using the RAND jury study from 1995-99 we were able to separate out California’s medical malpractice cases which were governed by the MICRA cap on noneconomic damages from the cases coming from five other states included in the study. We found that MICRA dampened the relationship between economic and non-economic damages. Using the data we coded from on Cook County, Illinois jury verdicts, we were able to expand our regression model to include the NAIC severity index plus the gender and age of the plaintiff. We found no evidence that the two demographic variables systematically influenced the amount of non-economic damages, but the severity of injury did make a difference. Most importantly, we found that the severity of the injury conditioned the relationship between economic and non-economic damages

Filing for Personal Bankruptcy: Adoption of a Bona Fide Effort Test Under Chapter 13

Part I discusses the history and current application of the Chapter 13 wage earner relief provisions, focusing on the present good faith controversy. Part II analyzes the bona fide effort test and examines its current congressional status. Part III suggests that more specific statutory guidance is necessary in order to effectively apply the bona fide effort test and recommends specific guidelines for its use. The article concludes that by following such a set of standard guidelines when applying the bona fide effort test, bankruptcy courts would promote uniform treatment of debtors, enhance judicial economy, and facilitate appellate review of Chapter 13 cases

Effective approach to the Nagaoka regime of the two dimensional t-J model

We argue that the t-J model and the recently proposed Ising version of this model give the same physical picture of the Nagaoka regime for J/t << 1. In particular, both models are shown to give compatible results for a single Nagaoka polaron as well as for a Nagaoka bipolaron. When compared to the standard t-J or t-Jz models, the Ising version allows for a numerical analysis on much larger clusters by means of classical Monte Carlo simulations. Taking the advantage of this fact, we study the low doping regime of t-J model for J/t << 1 and show that the ground state exhibits phase separation into hole-rich ferromagnetic and hole-depleted antiferromagnetic regions. This picture holds true up to a threshold concentration of holes, \delta < \delta_t ~ 0.44 \sqrt{J/t}. Analytical calculations show that \delta_t=\sqrt{J/2\pi t}.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, revte

The Psychology of Trial Judging

Trial court judges play a crucial role in the administration of justice for both criminal and civil matters. Although psychologists have studied juries for many decades, they have paid relatively little attention to judges. Recent writings, however, suggest that there is increasing interest in the psychology of judicial decision making. In this article, I review several selected areas of judicial behavior in which decisions appear to be influenced by psychological dispositions, but I caution that a mature psychology of judging field will need to consider the influence of the bureaucratic court setting in which judges are embedded, judges’ legal training, and the constraints of legal precedent