Decisions made within the legal and criminal justice systems are often consequential, shaping the lives of individual people and providing a foundation by which people perceive, interpret, and understand justice. These decisions are made by individual people (e.g., judges, case workers, and attorneys) and collectives (e.g., juries, legislatures, and parole boards), and often have far-reaching implications. Together, they create a historical backdrop to how society views and comprehends current legal decision-making. This book provides a comprehensive understanding and detailed synthesis of legal decision-making research, examining theories and decision models and discussing applications to law, policy, and practice from a psychological perspective.

This chapter discusses some of the existing beliefs about juror decision-making and the jury process at three distinct phases of a trial: before the trial, during the trial, and at the trial’s conclusion. Before the trial, there are beliefs surrounding the jury process, including jury duty, jury size, and jury selection (i.e. voir dire). During the trial, there are common beliefs surrounding courtroom factors that influence jury decision-making, including attitudes, beliefs, and expectations regarding attorneys, expert witnesses, confession evidence, and emotion-evoking evidence. Finally, at the end of trial, there is the existing belief that juries make extreme and unpredictable decisions in civil and criminal court. This chapter uses current research and empirical evidence within law and behavioral sciences to examine these myths, showing support for some of these beliefs, while also showing that others are simply myths about jury decision-making. Finally, the chapter discusses future research to address such myths.

A criminal confession typically ends in conviction, raising a critically important question: Why do suspects decide to confess to their guilt against their own self-interests? The authors of this chapter answer this question by reviewing a large body of theoretical and empirical research related to decision-making involving confessions. Major topics covered include the distinction between different types of confessions, the Reid technique, Miranda waiver decisions, psychological and dispositional vulnerabilities that encourage a confession decision, and interrogation reforms and their impact on confessions and interrogations. The core message of the chapter is that the dominant method of police interrogation used in North America relies on well-established social influence tactics that cause suspects to perceive a confession as a rational decision under the circumstances. The authors examine research involving these tactics and their effects on interrogations and confessions, along with laws and policies that regulate interviews and interrogations of suspects in custody.

The prevalence of white-collar crime (WCC) is alarming. WCC has a significant negative impact on a country’s economy and overall society. Several social and personal factors have been proposed to explain why people make the decision to perpetrate WCC. This chapter presents a brief summary of the established risk factors, which explain the decision to commit white-collar crime. Further, the chapter explores affluenza as a potential predictor of the decision to commit white-collar crime. Affluenza is defined as entitlement driven by a deep value for one’s elevated socioeconomic status, which blinds people to the social consequences of their actions. We discuss how affluenza might contribute to a person’s decision to commit WCC, as well as its legal implications. Further, future directions for research investigating the role of affluenza in perpetration of white-collar crime are discussed.

This chapter examines individual, social, and environmental factors associated with judicial decisions in juvenile dependency and juvenile justice cases. The structure and process of juvenile justice decisions are described along with a brief comparison to the adult courts. Current models and recommended guidance on juvenile dependency and juvenile justice cases are explored. Factors reviewed include, but are not limited to, legal considerations (e.g., removal, reunification, transfer/waiver, pleas, and placements), judicial education and expertise (e.g., formal training and judicial stress), bias (e.g., racial and socioeconomic prejudice), parent and youth characteristics (e.g., age and gender), family dynamics (e.g., parental engagement, child and parent attachment, and exposure to substances use and abuse), trauma, hearing practice, and representation. The chapter synthesizes the body of current research, discusses limitations in the current juvenile dependency and juvenile justice literature, and provides recommendations for future directions in both basic and applied research as well as policy implications for the legal decision-making field.

This chapter examines the development of public law in South Asia: a legal family that has been defined by its history of British colonialism and continued adherence to the common law legal tradition. It traces the evolution of constitutionalism in four countries – India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – since their independence from Britain, focusing on two common regional themes. The first is the judicialisation of politics through the adoption (or at least consideration) of the basic structure doctrine, which permits courts to define and enforce implicit limits on constitutional amendments. The second is the centralisation (and abuse of) executive power, which has imperilled democratic rule in all four countries. While neither of these developments is specific to South Asia, the interplay between them, resulting in separate spheres of unchecked judicial and executive domination, is perhaps unique to the region and warrants further attention from comparative scholars.

This chapter explores the current landscape of Latin American legal systems from a private law and public law perspective. The aim is to show the influences that have shaped each of these fields and their current state of development. The focus is on countries which are leading jurisdictions within the region, or that represent a particular trend or characteristic. Within the private law analysis, after a historical overview of the milestones in its formation process, some select topics are addressed. First, we consider how Latin American legal systems fit into the traditional categories of legal families; then, whether they can form a unique legal family; and, finally, current efforts to harmonise private law. The public law section centres on constitutional law and, in particular, on the New Latin American Constitutionalism (NLAC) movement. We identify the main features of the original NLAC Constitutions and then test them against the recent Chilean experience. The chapter concludes that interesting trends have developed within private and public law in the region but questions their distinctiveness and success.

Regional collaboration between states is increasingly vital to address the challenges of our time. Yet many regions struggle to collaborate effectively. Comparative regional law can contribute to effective regional collaboration. But it can also make a valuable contribution to the discipline of (comparative) law more generally, especially to rethinking the connection between law and the state, and better connecting our legal discipline to empirical methods. This contribution first sets out some key challenges for comparative regional law. For example, how to validly compare regions with vast and vital differences in history, (legal) culture, geography, language, and economies, and avoid pitfalls like EU-centrism or colonialism. As always in comparative law, no single perfect answer or method exists to address these challenges. Yet this contribution aims to help stock the comparative toolbox, so that researchers can pick and combine the proper methodological tools for the research questions they want to pursue. The main claim therefore is that, considering the nature of regional law, a functionalist method, complemented and checked by more critical methods, might often be a suitable approach. If done carefully, like two hedgehogs making love, comparing regional law can then produce academically and practically valuable results.

Comparative law has grown out of its traditional theoretical and methodological boundaries. However, much of comparative law scholarship may still be described as traditional. This chapter discusses the traditional view of comparative law research. What can be characterised as traditional comparative law has concentrated on the private law of major Western legal systems, leaving other areas of law and non-Western systems mostly aside. In substance, while it is not entirely clear what can be labelled as traditional methods, we can separate three essential issues. The first issue concerns the research process and how traditional comparative law scholars have outlined it. Traditional comparative law scholarship typically provides guidance on how research should be conducted. The second issue deals with the specific method of functionalism that has been recommended to be used in the comparative research. At the heart of the functionalist methodology lies the assumption according to which there are legal rules or institutions that serve a certain social function. The third issue concerns the underlying assumption behind functionalism, that is universalism. Universalism maintains that every society faces essentially the same problems, and that societies solve these problems by different means, though often with similar results. The chapter ends with a critical analysis and thoughts about the future of traditional methods.

Comparative lawyers are interested in similarities between legal systems. Artificial intelligence offers a new approach to understanding legal families. This chapter introduces machine-learning methods useful in empirical comparative law, a nascent field. This chapter provides a step-by-step guide to evaluating and developing legal family theories using machine-learning algorithms. We briefly survey existing empirical comparative law data sets, and then demonstrate how to visually explore these using a data set one of us compiled. We introduce popular and powerful algorithms of service to comparative law scholars, including dissimilarity coefficients, dimension reduction, clustering, and classification. The unsupervised machine-learning method enables researchers to develop a legal family scheme without the interference from existing schemes developed by human intelligence, thus providing a powerful tool to test comparative law theories. The supervised machine-learning method enables researchers to start with a baseline scheme (developed by human or artificial intelligence) and then extend it to previously unstudied jurisdictions.

The debate about legal convergence and divergence has played a prominent role in many areas of law including company law. Although the rules of company law are largely country-specific, certain good governance principles are recognised throughout the EU and many modern jurisdictions around the globe. One of these norms is the equal treatment of shareholders in corporate governance. Shareholder rights usually develop mainly as a means of protection granted to shareholders against management (or controlling shareholders). In terms of comparative law, dissimilarities in shareholder protection may be because of differences in substantive law, but in the case of Turkey variations in the patterns of legal culture and institutional development are seen as the main sources of divergence.

Language and translation are fundamental to comparative law not only as materials and tools in comparisons but also as determinants of methodological choices. Their importance has been largely downplayed in comparative law and it was not until recently that they were acknowledged more explicitly by interdisciplinary postmodern comparative methods. This chapter discusses linguistic approaches to comparative law which foreground the issues of language and translation in comparisons, relying on insights from legal linguistics and legal translation studies. The chapter first discusses methodological developments in comparative law and linguistics which have facilitated this shift. It presents cognitive and communicative aspects of legal semantics and their implications for the depth of comparisons. The chapter next centres on theoretical foundations of and approaches to legal translation in a variety of intersystemic, intrasystemic and hybrid contexts. The final section gives an overview of legal linguistic comparisons beyond the term level, focusing on genres and Eurolects. In conclusion, it is argued that linguistic approaches should be integrated more systematically, triangulated with other comparative law methods and supported by empirical research.

Quantitative research has grown to be part of the standard methodological portfolio for comparative lawyers. Large-sample quantitative studies search for correlations between legal institutions and socioeconomic outcomes, while indicators have become important tools of governance. Such initiatives, however, have been criticised for unduly simplifying complex legal realities, possibly betraying an ideological bias, and then hiding it under a cloak of quantitative data. This chapter argues that much of this critique misses the point. While it is important to be sceptical of indicators’ ability to describe reality, quantitative methodologies are part of a wider turn towards a flexible form of global governance, in which the accurate description of reality is not essential. Instead, they reflect a version of reality created for a specific purpose, which participants acting in a given regulatory space agree is not ‘real’. This lack of reality, though, is irrelevant: what matters is that the specific version of reality created by the indicator serves its institutional purpose. We must recognise it as a particular form of quantitative knowledge that, regardless of its accuracy, is constantly used instrumentally, and may open new spaces for politics, contestation, and resistance that are overlooked by the more traditional, accuracy-focused critique.

Conflict of laws (or private international law) deals with cross-border legal relationships involving private parties. Methods of modern conflict of laws originate in Europe and largely remained intact until today despite modifications brought about by the US Conflicts Revolution. Other parts of the world, that is, Latin America, Asia and Africa, have not been on the centre stage. Even the recent globalisation discourse on legal pluralism and conflict of laws has principally focused on Western, developed countries, although the wave of globalisation affects the entire world. Countries in the Global South have been invisible presumably because, as former colonies, they are not readily accessible, are presumed not to have sophisticated conflicts rules, or are deselected by the choice of forum/arbitration clauses in cross-border business transactions. This chapter will deal with comparative conflict of laws from a non-Western viewpoint. This stance will allow for the relativising of the trends of conflict of laws in Europe and America and shed light on the recent debates on corporate due diligence and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in conflict of laws by considering interests of the most affected and vulnerable people in the Global South. This chapter will also discuss future developments of conflict of laws treaties, which Asian and African countries have rarely joined so far.

With the advent of globalisation and the ubiquity of modern technology, the world has become increasingly interdependent, and a seamless transnational flow of commodities and capital is gradually erasing national boundaries. Constitutional ideas too are not immune from this globalizing force. Mark Tushnet has projected that constitutional systems all over the world will ‘inevitably’ converge ‘in their structures and in their protections of fundamental human rights’. There are multiple pathways to such constitutional convergence. The changes can arise exogenously, for example when new constitutions are imposed by foreign powers on domestic states, or when countries are coerced into accepting constitutional change in exchange for economic or military aid. Other constitutional changes can occur endogenously, for example the domestic legislature relies on foreign materials to amend its constitution, or domestic judges incorporate comparative legal materials when interpreting their local constitutions. This chapter focuses on Asian developments. Specially, it seeks to explain why Taiwan and South Korea – two liberal democracies – are converging with the West on constitutional jurisprudence, while authoritarian states like China and Singapore – deeply suspicious of Western values – remain outliers and have diverged from this cosmopolitan constitutional project.