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

Formation of Strain-Induced Quantum Dots in Gated Semiconductor Nanostructures

Elastic strain changes the energies of the conduction band in a semiconductor, which will affect transport through a semiconductor nanostructure. We show that the typical strains in a semiconductor nanostructure from metal gates are large enough to create strain-induced quantum dots (QDs). We simulate a commonly used QD device architecture, metal gates on bulk silicon, and show the formation of strain-induced QDs. The strain-induced QD can be eliminated by replacing the metal gates with poly-silicon gates. Thus strain can be as important as electrostatics to QD device operation operation.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, plus supplementary informatio