Frameworks for Modeling Cognition and Decisions in Institutional Environments

Abstract

The Law-Governance and Technology Series is intended to attract manuscripts arising from an interdisciplinary approach in law, artificial intelligence and information technologies. The idea is to bridge the gap between research in IT law and ITapplications for lawyers developing a unifying techno-legal perspective. The series will welcome proposals that have a fairly specific focus on problems or projects that will lead to innovative research charting the course for new interdisciplinary developments in law, legal theory, and law and society research as well as in computer technologies, artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. In broad strokes, manuscripts for this series may be mainly located in the fields of the Internet law (data protection, intellectual property, Internet rights, etc.), Computational models of the legal contents and legal

The effect of judges' gender on decisions regarding intimate‐partner violence

“…On the constraints side of the equation, judicial decisions, as any other kind of decisions, are constrained by the uncertainty surrounding the problem at hand—shaped only in part by the legal facts of the case (Dyevre, 2010)—and by the information costs of making good decisions (Kahneman et al, 1982; Newell, 1990; Simon, 1955, 1957). As most experts, judges deal only imperfectly with probabilities and with the “evidence‐belief‐decision” path (Sonnemans & van Dijk, 2012), but they become better professional decision‐makers by identifying patterns of events from past decisions that can be used as templates to make better and more efficient decisions in the future (Gigerenzer and ABC‐Research‐Group, 2008; Richards, 2016; Vallbé, 2015). Therefore, as they learn from experience judges need less time to gather information.…”

“…As they become experts they learn from past decisions identifying patterns of events from similar cases (March & Simon, 1958;Simon, 1997), thus decreasing average uncertainty with experience. Past evidence shows that at early stages of their career (i.e., when uncertainty is high), judges feel less secure about being creative with their decisions, especially when they are on duty (Vallbé, 2015), and thus their decisions tend to be more bound by rules and grounded on legalistic terms (Epstein et al, 2013), because they are less prone to the discretionary use of their attitudes and values to make decisions (Martin & Pyle, 2005). This, in turn, has been found to translate into worse judicial outcomes for plaintiffs (Engel & Weinshall, 2020).…”

Across the Sloping Meadow Floor: An Empirical Analysis of Preremoval Detention of Noncitizens

“…In this context, one relevant difference refers to the way judges are appointed as well as their legal background. For instance, the judges studied by Dhami and Ayton () are lay magistrates who “are members of the local community who are appointed to perform judicial duties on a part‐time, unpaid basis,” and “who are not required to have any formal legal training.” In contrast, judges in Spain must have formal legal training (i.e., a law degree) and pass a very demanding, competitive examination based on legal knowledge (Poblet and Casanovas ; Vallbé ). In addition, as tenured civil servants most judges enjoy life‐long careers in the judiciary.…”

“…The 72‐hour process that leads to a decision about the detention or release of a deportable noncitizen represents a good example of an on‐call situation (Vallbé ). The number of tasks a judge must pay attention to while on call take the form of parallel issues (March )—typically raised by the police, lawyers, and public prosecution.…”

“…The use of heuristics in legal reasoning has received some theoretical attention in the last years (Bainbridge and Gulati ; Gigerenzer and Engel ; Guthrie et al ; Rachlinski et al ) and there is growing empirical evidence of its relevance in judicial decision‐making. For instance, Vallbé () carried out an empirical analysis of the extent to which the lack of organizational routines providing tested heuristics (routinized rules of thumb) for inexperienced judges to deal with highly uncertain decision processes produced stressful conditions and inefficient organizational memories.…”