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This article, featuring Laura Beth Nielsen, suggests that current implementations of Title IX policies leave them ineffective to combat sexual assaults on campus.

This article by Traci Burch identifies the justification frame as a common narrative used by public officials to justify the use of lethal force by police.

Featuring Stephen Daniels, this article considers the Washington State Supreme Court’s creation of the ‘limited licensed legal technician’ (LLLT).

This article highlights growing concerns about jury fairness, emphasizing the need for improvements in jury selection, trial processes, and deliberations to ensure a fair justice system.

This article analyzes a survey of tenured law professors in the United States to track how gender and race are tied to salary outcomes.

Traci Burch explores the likelihood that officer-involved killings affect protest in this article.

ABF’s Janice Nadler analyzes how the composition of crime news articles contributes to perceptions of moral blameworthiness of offenders in this study.

Featuring Jacob Goldin, this article examines the impact of tax preparation outreach on low-income households’ take-up of benefits.

Traci Burch presents evidence that exposure to officer-involved deaths of low-threat Black victims increases political interest and voter turnout among Black survey respondents.

Featuring Shari Diamond, this article suggests a revised approach to juror blindfolding to prevent any legally unacceptable influences on jury decisions.

  • Articles

Jury Room Ruminations on Forbidden Topics

Shari Seidman Diamond, Neil Viadmar and Shari Seidman Diamond
Learning and Practicing Law
December 2001

From The Virginia Law Review:

The early English jury consisted of a group of witnesses assembled to report on facts they were presumed to know in advance of the formal proceedings. In sharp contrast, the modem American jury is expected to learn the facts of the case only from the evidence that the parties present at trial. According to many accounts, the rules of evidence of the Anglo-American legal system developed in large measure to control the jury and to channel its decisionmaking. A prominent feature of the rules of evidence is the set of exclusions that blindfold jurors to facts about the case that might influence their decisions in legally unacceptable ways.

The blindfolding approach to jury control implicitly assumes that jurors will not consider a topic unless it is introduced at trial. Modem behavioral research on the jury, however, both rejects the image of the jury as a blank slate on which evidence is etched and raises serious questions about the ability of some of these blindfolding efforts to control the jury by simply prohibiting mention of specific topics at trial. In this paper, we will suggest a revised approach to blindfolding. Our approach is informed by some preliminary data from the videotaped deliberations of forty civil juries that were collected as part of our Arizona Jury Project. The analysis distinguishes between conditions that are likely to benefit from blindfolding and those that call for other strategies to optimally focus the jury’s attention on legally relevant information.