The Role of Narratives in Legal Education

The significance of narrative as the primary form of human communication forms the basis of this paper. Following a brief consideration of the natural inter-relationship between law and narrative, the author goes on to discuss the more specific application of a narrative approach to legal scholarship and legal education. The paper sets out the findings of a practical research project that took as its inspiration James Boyd White’s portrayal of the law student as a creative and imaginative thinker, and Martha Nussbaum’s claim that it is through the power of ‘narrative imagination’ that we gain a broader appreciation and understanding of humanity. It explains how a group of law students participated in ‘the Narrative Research Project’ at the University of Leicester; participating in story-telling seminars and creating their own fictional narratives from appellate case reports. It describes the students’ reaction to the project as heartening in the sense that they became more aware of the significant role that human actors play in legal proceedings, but it also expresses doubts over the extent to which such an approach can, by itself, cultivate humanity in the law school.     

Learning in Law Annual Conference Website – A Review

There is pressure to increase the substantive content covered in the business law curriculum. Yet, a content-laden curriculum risks students taking the “surface” approach of rote learning sets of disjointed legal rules without any real grasp of the relevant legal concepts involved or how legal knowledge can be applied to solve the dynamic and untidy problems they will face in their impending business careers. Drawing on relevant educational and legal literature, this article presents a case for more problem-based learning (PBL) to be used in undergraduate business law courses. It suggests that a hybrid form of PBL has the potential to promote deeper and more self-directed learning. PBL also provides an opportunity to make learning the law a more relevant, motivating and authentic experience for business students. Such an improved learning experience is likely to better prepare business students for the legal challenges they will face in their future careers.     

Potentially dangerous behavior in the mentally ill: attitudes of journalists and medical students toward compulsory admission

Compulsory admission is a critical measure that may lead to stigmatization of patients. The authors investigated what medical students and journalists consider legitimate conditions for compulsory admission. The most frequently quoted conditions in both groups were violent attempts against others. About one third of each group considered continuous neglect as a reason. Students significantly more often than journalists advocated for civil commitment in the case of suicide attempts and violent attempts. Medical students with personal contact with mentally disordered persons advocated significantly more often for coercive measures in the case of suicide attempts. Comparing journalists and medical students having personal contact with mentally disordered persons revealed that medical students significantly more often supported commitment. Journalists displayed a more liberal attitude toward the mentally ill than did medical students.     

Sudden epilepsy deaths and the forensic pathologist

Sudden unexpected deaths in epileptic persons are not rare events, most commonly encountered by the forensic pathologist rather than the clinician. Such deaths may represent 1-1.5% of all "natural" deaths certified by the medical examiner or coroner. The typical victim is a black male about 30 years of age who tends to abuse alcohol, with a history of generalized epilepsy for more than 1 year and likely for more than 10 years. There are a lack of obvious anatomic causes for the death at autopsy, but 60-70% of cases will have a lesion in the brain (most commonly old trauma) to explain the epilepsy. Most victims have no blood levels of anticonvulsant medications at the time of death. We have evolved a form for use by medical examiner/coroner's investigators at the scene to collect relevant information which will be of assistance to the pathologist in interpreting the case. Estimated prevalence of sudden epilepsy death, mechanisms, and other features of such cases are reviewed briefly.     

More Norms,Less Justice: Refugees,the Republic,and everyone in between

The paper argues for conflating refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) as two sides of a work-in-progress postcolonial state. To be sure, aliens, refugees, IDPs, and stateless persons are separate legal entities. Nevertheless, this fragmented normative regime stands testimony to more laws and less justice. Many Asian states have no domestic refugee law. India, a common law system, takes a case by case approach as refugees are given “temporary shelter on humanitarian considerations”. Ironically, a work-in-progress postcolonial state sustains even de jure citizens as de facto stateless persons; the erstwhile Indo-Bangla enclaves for more than half a century were an apt example. Surely, the raison d’être of international law on refugees is to end human suffering, if needed, by transcending the absence of positive laws. A constitutional and political desire to minimise human suffering alone could cut the rigour of such positivist legal narratives. The Delhi High Court seemingly walked that path in Koul v Estate Officer noting “refugees and IDPs appear to be similarly situated”. Rising terrorism has made states increasingly believe in a security narrative all the same. A simultaneous emergence of a demographic anxiety particularly in India’s North-eastern states increasingly pits aliens and refugees against the domiciled indigenous and tribal people.     

Finding the missing and unknown: Novel educational approaches to warming up cold cases

In recent years, students in police academies and higher education institutions around the world have worked together to analyse cold cases including long-term missing persons cases in collaboration with investigators and prosecutors. In 2020, three European organisations, the Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN-MP), AMBER Alert Europe and Locate International, succeeded in connecting these educational organisations enabling them to work collectively on cases and conduct cold case analyses (CCA) across international borders. The International Cold Case Analysis Project (ICCAP) learning objectives were to 1) collect the necessary information about the victim, 2) reconstruct the crime, and 3) investigate trace control.In a learning objective-based evaluation using Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing, 76 participating students from the German and International ICCAP teams were asked to complete a pre- and post-review questionnaire to self-assess their personal competence development. Participants reported significant increases in competence in all evaluated areas, thus demonstrating that authentic and relevant collaborations can enrich the learning environment, promote the use of professional skills, and provide significant knowledge exchange opportunities between academia and industry.Drawing on case studies of cold case missing persons' investigations and unidentified found remains, this article shares how university academics, students and community volunteers can work together nationally and internationally to find out what has happened to missing people and how we can more effectively identify the previously unidentified. In so doing, we share the expertise required to progress these cold cases and provide recommendations to support other institutions and organisations in adopting this innovative approach.     

The potential of collaborative learning as a tool for forensic students: Application to signature examination

Transferring theoretical knowledge to practical skills remains a big challenge in forensic science, especially in questioned documents. The examination of handwriting and signatures requires years of practice to develop the necessary skills. While students (and to some extent the general population) often have the impression that it is easy to differentiate handwriting from different persons, in practice, particularly when dealing with simulated signatures, there is a high risk of reaching a wrong conclusion when questioned document experts do not use a systematic approach and/or are not sufficiently experienced (see for example the famous French Dreyfus case). Thus, a novel teaching approach, based on collaborative learning, has been introduced in a theoretical handwriting class to improve the students’ theoretical knowledge, and additionally make them aware of the limitations of their practical skills and give them tools to improve them in their future practice. Through five activities, the students took the roles of victims, forgers, teachers and experts and created their own learning materials (i.e. signatures and mock casework). During those interactive activities, they learned to describe their signature’s characteristics, intra-variability and complexity, and thus evaluate their own signature’s vulnerability (as potential victims). They learned techniques to simulate signatures and detect the resulting forgeries’ characteristics (in the role of forgers). In the role of teachers, they prepared mock casework scenarios and gave feedback to their colleague’s examination of the produced material. As experts, they carried out signature examination as they would in a proficiency test and were exposed to the difficulties an actual expert may encounter in practice. The evaluation of this novel teaching scenario was very positive, as students learned more extensively the possibilities and limitations of signature comparison. They were more active and motivated in their learning experiences. The teaching team also had an improved experience. Some students complained of an increased workload and imprecise instructions. Improvements were tested and are discussed in this paper.     

A Dutch perspective: the limits of lawful euthanasia

Dutch author Ubaldus de Vries reviews the current state of the euthanasia law in the Netherlands. The legislation, enacted in 2001, creates a medical exception that allows for euthanasia in cases where patients experience "hopeless and unbearable suffering." A brief history of the Dutch approach to euthanasia is set forth, case law is reviewed, and the unique role of the doctor is examined in seeking to understand the extent of one's right to euthanasia in the Netherlands. Because the courts must determine what constitutes "hopeless and unbearable suffering," Professor de Vries analyzes the judicial interpretation of "suffering" and concludes that judicial interpretation has reached its limits, and thus by implication, the limits of lawful euthanasia have been reached.     

Philosophy in the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mahābhārata</Emphasis> and the History of Indian Philosophy

The study of philosophical terms and doctrines in the Mahābhārata touches not only on important aspects of the contents, composition and the historical contexts of the epic, but also on the historiography of Indian philosophy. General ideas about the textual history of the epic and the distinction between “didactic” and “narrative” parts have influenced the study of epic philosophy no less than academic discussions about what is philosophy in India and how it developed. This results in different evaluations of the place of philosophical texts in the epic and their relationship to the history of Indian philosophy. While some scholars have suggested that there is a “philosophy of the epic” its composers wished to propagate, others have argued that “philosophy” is included in the epic either in a “proto” form or in a variety of doctrines (often presented is “mixed” or “unsystematic” ways) they deemed relevant. The article discusses these views and some of the heuristic assumptions on which they are based. It proposes to widen the scope of analysis by paying more attention to the interplay of narrative and didactic passages, the various ways in which philosophy is presented in the epic, and its connection to a larger spectrum of the reception of philosophy in textual genres and by audiences outside the expert circles of the philosophical schools.     

A developmental history of the American Psychology-Law Society

The American Psychology-Law Society, now in its 22nd year, began in 1969 after an, organizational meeting in 1968. It played a role in the creation of Division 41 (Psychology and Law) of the American Psychological Association in 1981. The Division became the American Psychology-Law Society/Division 41 with the merger of the two organizations in 1984. The present narrative history of the Society's development is based on information from newsletters, documents of Society business, and recollections communicated to the author by individuals who played critical roles in the Society's development. The history is organized according to five stages, with special attention to competitive and cooperative efforts of subgroups as they sought to define the directions and purposes of the Society.This article is based on my address to the American Psychology-Law Society/Division 41 at the convention of the American Psychological Association in Boston (August 12, 1990) at the conclusion of my presidency of AP-LS/Division 41. I wish to thank several people who contributed to this history by offering me their memories, their files, and/or their reflections on earlier drafts of this paper: Gordon Bermant, Donald Bersoff, Stanley Brodsky, Shari Diamond, Sheila Dietz, Robert Howell, Felice Levine, Paul Lipsitt, Gary Melton, John Monahan, Stephen Morse, Michael Nash, Steven Penrod, Michael Saks, Bruce Sales, Saleem Shah, June Louin Tapp, and Jay Ziskin. The scholarship and organizational support of many well-known colleagues who are not mentioned in the course of this narrative history significantly influenced the development of the Society and the field of psychology and law during the past two decades. In my early drafts however, I found that a narrative that attempted to mention the majority of them would produce a fragmented work through which the flow of events in the Society's history would not be discerned easily. In selecting who to identify, I focused primarily on individuals who contributed to the organization as visible leaders and who, therefore, would form a cast of characters that would provide the best medium for telling the story of the Society. I have developed and am maintaining a cumulative archival repository (which will be the possession of AP-LS/Division 41) for documents and oral communications related to the history and business of AP-LS/Division 4L, Anyone having pre-1988 copies of newsletters of AP-LS or AP-LS/Division 41, or other documents describing the business of these organizations, are encouraged to send them to me, either for domation or to be photocopied and returned.     

Teaching medical ethics and law

The teaching of medical ethics is not yet characterised by recognised, standard requirements for formal qualifications, training and experience; this is not surprising as the field is still relatively young and maturing. Under the broad issue of the requirements for teaching medical ethics are numerous more specific questions, one of which concerns whether medical ethics can be taught in isolation from considerations of the law, and vice versa. Ethics and law are cognate, though distinguishable, disciplines. In a practical, professional enterprise such as medicine, they cannot and should not be taught as separate subjects. One way of introducing students to the links and tensions between medical ethics and law is to consider the history of law via its natural and positive traditions. This encourages understanding of how medical practice is placed within the contexts of ethics and law in the pluralist societies in which most students will practise. Four examples of topics from medical ethics teaching are described to support this claim. Australasian medical ethics teachers have paid less attention to the role of law in their curricula than their United Kingdom counterparts. Questions like the one addressed here will help inform future deliberations concerning minimal requirements for teaching medical ethics.     

Visualizing Lives: New Pathways for Analyzing Life Course Trajectories

The goal of statistical analysis is to find patterns in data. Most statistical methods rely on analyzing the effect of the same set of variables on the population under study, i.e., nomothetic analysis. Therefore, when data are collected in the social sciences, most often they are put in a framework that resembles a spreadsheet: each row represents a separate individual, and each column represents a separate characteristic (or variable) that pertains to that individual.However, not all individuals in the study are affected by the same set of variables: each individual may have his/her own individual set of relevant variables, suggesting that methods be developed that consider them individually, i.e., idiographic analysis. Moreover, lives are lived chronologically, and are often best described in narrative form. These narratives usually have to be condensed, or abridged in other ways, in order to fit the data framework and permit what one might call ``algorithmic analysis. Each set of methods has its advantage: nomothetic methods generate general laws that apply to all, while idiographic methods trace the putative causal relationships that are unique to each individual.This paper describes another data collection and analytic framework, one that (a) is chronological; (b) recognizes that different people may have experienced entirely different events and thus may need different ``variables to understand their behavior; (c) recognizes that, even if people experience similar events, they may have entirely different reactions to them; and (d) can be studied (and patterns inferred) using an exploratory graphical analysis that is more free-form than algorithmic analysis. Examples of this type of analysis used in different medical and criminal justice contexts are given, and suggested directions of research in this area are described.     

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being ‘an undergoer’ rather than an ‘effector’ of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using ‘grammatical logic’, it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the ‘story of intentionality’ (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14, 20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker’s book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime.     

Legal Aim, Discretion, and Social Control

This study attempts to ascertain how the legal a i m of rehabilitation are applied, as well as their social control consequences for a group of offenders sentenced under the Federal Youth Corrections Act (FYCA) of 1950. Discriminant function analyses were conducted on a random sample of 452 persons selected f o r a "special" FYCA rehabilitative disposition and 758 persons accorded a regular punitive disposition, to determine 1) the factors that influence the judge's choice between these two outcomes; and 2) if persons sentenced under the special rehabilitative provision spend more or less time incarcerated, relative to those given a regular disposition Our analyses indicate that age is the single discriminator of much significance in determining whether an offender is given a FYCA or regular disposition, with younger persons more likely to receive rehabilitative treatment. Little support was found for the contention that greater intrusiveness of social control inevitably results from adoption of a rehabilitative form of social control as opposed to a regular punitive disposition. The implications of these findings for the application and consequences of the FYCA are discussed.     

Experimental statistical studies on the evaluation of the value of evidence in the comparison of human hair

In this paper a statistical experiment is presented which allows to estimate the evidential value of human head hair comparison. The procedure described in detail was essentially the same as in case-work. Questioned hairs were taken randomly from 20 different persons out of a pool of 111 individuals. From each of the 20 persons one, three an five hairs respectively were compared consectively with samples from 100 different individuals. The results were classified as follows: a) "matching" and b) "similar" - if the hair(s) may originate form that person; c) "not matching" - if an individual is excluded as possible source. In our experiment about 95% of the samples (persons) were excluded as possible source of a questioned hair on the average. This is a mean value which may vary considerably in a distinct case. The experiment, its results and problems are discussed.     

Belief in a Just World as a Resource of Victimized Students

In a cross-sectional questionnaire study with N?=?2593 German students, aged between 12 and 17 years (M?=?14.1, SD?=?0.5), we investigated the relation between students’ personal belief in a just world (BJW) and their victimization in bullying situations. According to the just-world theory and research, we expected that the more strongly the students endorsed the personal BJW, the less likely they were to report being victimized by other students. We aimed to extend previous findings that failed to confirm this negative relation by considering students’ personal experience of teacher justice as a possible mediator in this relation, while statistically controlling for sex and school type. We further considered the nested data structure with regard to school classes in our analyses. The results of latent mediation analyses at the individual and group levels showed that the more the students endorsed personal BJW, the more they evaluated their teachers’ behavior toward them personally as being just, and the less likely they were to report that they were bullied. However, the students’ personal experience of teacher justice did not mediate the relation between personal BJW and victimization at the individual or group level when controlled for sex and school type. We discussed the adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research and practice.     

Reductio Ad Absurdum: The Kapo Trial Judgements’ Contribution To International Criminal Law Jurisprudence And Customary International Law

Several Jewish persons designated as concentration camp guards (Kapos) during the Holocaust were subsequently tried in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s for allegedly committing grave crimes. This article examines these trial judgements and considers their significance to international criminal law jurisprudence and customary international law. First, this article will delineate the trial judgements’ purpose, relevance and previous contribution to customary international law. Secondly, a comparative narrative of the judgements with recent case law from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court will illuminate their potential contribution, specifically to the principles of modes of liability, criminal intent, and the defence of duress. The Kapo trial judgements may therefore continue to offer an extreme case example and a worthy source of common law for international criminal law jurisprudence and customary international law.     

SUPPORTING FAMILY STRENGTH: THE USE OF TRANSFORMATIVE MEDIATION IN A PINS MEDIATION CLINIC

This article describes, and explains the rationales for, the establishment of an innovative program in which a law school and two social services agencies are collaborating in a mediation clinic that uses the transformative model of mediation to serve clients in cases that seem ideally suited to benefit from this approach to practice—so-called "PINS" (persons in need of supervision) cases involving conflict within families, between parents and their adolescent children. The article first describes the evolution of the PINS system and the changing views of its purpose, especially in New York State. It then offers a brief introduction to the unique features of the transformative approach to mediation and explains why that approach in particular is likely to mesh with current understandings of the needs of the families involved in these cases. Finally, the article describes the innovative "Family Solutions Program" and how it uses transformative mediation to help these families and suggests that experience of this program shows how use of the transformative model, in particular, could be valuable not only for clinical education but also for effective volunteer training and supervision in mediation programs generally.     

University Students' Attitudes About Attributing Blame in Domestic Violence

This study examined university students' attitudes about attributing blame in incidents of domestic violence. The Domestic Violence Blame Scale (DVBS), which measures the attribution of blame for domestic violence to situational, perpetrator, societal, and victim factors, was used. The DVBS was administered to a voluntary sample of university students. Significant gender differences were found, with male students more likely to attribute blame to the victim for domestic violence than female students. Significant differences were also found between students with and without a prior history of violence in their family of origin. Students with prior experience of violence were more likely than their counterparts to ascribe blame for domestic violence to societal factors.     

Testamentary competency

This paper examines the development of the doctrine that restricts testation to competent persons, and the use of expert testimony in implementing that doctrine. Since 1870 the leading articulation of this doctrine has been Lord Cockburn's Rule, which among other things requires that the testator knew the natural objects of his bounty at the time the will was made. The facultative theory of mind underlying Lord Cockburn's Rule is consistent with the contemporary, functional approach to competency to make medical decisions taken by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Where expert testimony, based on training in the behavioral sciences, takes a functional approach to discovering the nature of the testator's values regarding other persons, it can assist the trier of fact significantly more than the lay opinion testimony which many courts have preferred in questions of testamentary competency. The concern of commentators that courts make false attributions of testamentary competency out of a perceived need to protect the family would be lessened, and the freedom of testation promoted, if courts directed their attention, through the kind of expert testimony proposed, to the testator's psychological family, instead of the persons identified as family members in intestacy statutes.The author wishes to thank Professors John Monahan, Roberta A. Morris, and Richard J. Bonnie for their helpful critiques of an earlier draft of this paper. The author also gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Vicki L. Epling and Paul A. Lombardo, law students at the University of Virginia.A portion of this paper was presented by the author at the 1982 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association under the title, The Application of Psychology to Legal Problems Involving Trusts and Estates, as part of the symposium, Psychological Questions in Legal Areas Largely Unexplored by Psychologists. This symposium was proposed and organized by Professor Gary B. Melton of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.