How jurors construe “insanity”

Historically and currently, jurors who have rendered verdicts in insanity cases have themselves been criticized and maligned-accused of being simplistic and biased, of lacking understanding, and of disregarding or nullifying the judge's instructions. Are the critics right? In this study, 263 mock jurors (141 adults and 122 students) were asked to decide four insanity cases without instructions, using their own best judgment, and to identify the determinative facts for them, and the meaning of those facts. Those determinative factors were then categorized, using a seven construct schema for NGRI and guilty verdicts. The results show that jurors do make discriminations among cases in terms of constructs, and that these constructs are relevant, complex, and flexible; furthermore, the jurors' lay constructs of insanity are more complex than the legal constructs of insanity. The “simplism,” it seems, lies not with the jurors but with the insanity tests.     

Fat and the law: who should take the blame?

The incidence of obesity in both adults and children is rising at a rapid rate in most developed countries, including in Australia. Some obese people are seeking to place the blame for their condition on the fast-food industry, as demonstrated by the recent litigation in the United States brought by two obese plaintiffs against McDonald's. This litigation was unsuccessful, and on existing Australian negligence principles any similar litigation commenced here is likely to suffer the same fate. Principles of personal responsibility, autonomy and free will should prevail to deny a negligence claim. The risk of obesity and concomitant health problems from eating fast food to excess is an obvious risk which the plaintiff should not have ignored and which he or she has voluntarily assumed. It is for the Australian Government, not the courts, to regulate the behaviour of the fast-food industry. The government should take action by requiring all major fast-food chains to label their products with nutritional information, and by imposing restrictions on the advertising of food to children.     

Fatal Families: Why Children are Killed in Familicide Occurrences

This literature review attempts to identify the underlying factors and commonalities regarding the killing of children in occurrences of familicide (wherein the entire family is slain by a family member). Numerous journal and newspaper articles were reviewed to glean information regarding similarities in victim families, the breakdown of the family prior to the incident of familicide, and the degree of pre-meditation by the perpetrator. This information is then used to discuss and inform possible implications in counselling such as assessment, prevention, and grief and loss therapy as well as directions for future research.     

Beyond Endogeneity: How Firms and Regulators Co‐Construct the Meaning of Regulation

What role do regulators and firms play in the construction of open‐ended regulatory terms? The new institutional legal endogeneity model posits that organizations respond to legal uncertainty by adopting formal structures to symbolically signal their compliance. These structures, however, tend to embody businesses' managerial and commercial values, as opposed to regulatory goals. Law becomes endogenous insofar as legal actors then defer to businesses' institutionalized ideas about regulation and compliance. Professionals, such as lawyers and human‐resource managers, and their strategic deployment of framing, are portrayed as the engines of the above process of legal endogeneity. By comparison, administrative agencies' strategies in shaping the meaning that corporations attach to the law are practically ignored. Building on a detailed case study of British financial firms' responses to the Financial Services Authority's Treating Customers Fairly initiative, this article problematizes the supposition of regulatory deference to business constructions of law. Instead, it develops a more balanced model that recognizes business professionals' and regulators' co‐construction of regulation and compliance. The process of regulatory meaning co‐construction, as depicted by this model, involves alignment and disputes between regulators' and professionals' strategic framing of regulatory concerns with tangible consequences for the enactment of regulation.     

Development of an Index of Subsidized Housing Availability and its Relationship to Housing Insecurity

Housing insecurity is a known threat to child health understanding predictors of housing insecurity can help inform policies to protect the health of young children in low-income households. This study sheds light on the relationship between housing insecurity and availability of housing that is affordable to low-income households.

We developed a county-level index of availability of subsidized housing needed to meet the demand of low-income households. Our results estimate that if subsidized units are made available to an additional 5% of the eligible population, the odds of overcrowding decrease by 26% and the odds of families making multiple moves decrease by 31%. Both of these are known predictors of poor child health outcomes. Thus, these results suggest that state and federal investments in expanding the stock of subsidized housing could reduce housing insecurity and thereby also improve the health and well-being of young children, including their families' food security status.     

Facts,Preferences, and Doctrine: An Empirical Analysis of Proportionality Judgment

Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the antiterrorist military practice of targeted killings, which has been the subject of a legal debate. Our experimental findings suggest that proportionality judgments are receptive to normatively relevant facts. We also find strong correlational evidence for the effect of ideological preferences on such judgments. These results are consistent for two proportionality doctrines. We suggest that proportionality judgment is anchored jointly in the experts’ policy preferences and the facts of the case. We outline the implications of the findings for the psychological and legal literature.