christian h. bijoux
Georgetown University
Dr. christian bijoux is a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University and a CJJR senior leadership team member. In this capacity, chris leads the integration of a comprehensive Community Development and Racial Equity framework across all CJJR's transformative programs and initiatives. This includes instrumental contributions to the Crossover Youth Practice Model, the Breakthrough Series Collaborative, and the implementation of antiracism and equity and fairness professional development throughout the country.
Dr. bijoux is a nationally renowned thought leader and race scholar. His wealth of experience encompasses a tenure as the Director of the Dually Involved Youth Initiative in Santa Clara County, CA. Additionally, as a program coordinator consultant with the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, dr. bijoux was integral in developing and facilitating equity and fairness workshops and co-chairing the DYS Family Advisory Council.
Beyond his impactful roles in the field, dr. bijoux has also shared his expertise as an adjunct professor at Newbury College. He holds a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and Health Policy and a Master of Business Administration, both of which fortify his versatile approach to addressing complex issues.
In 2023, chris attained a significant milestone by completing a doctorate in Social Policy at Brandeis University's Heller School of Social Policy. This notable achievement solidifies his commitment to advancing knowledge and driving radical equity and racial justice transformation.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
Unveiling Injustice: Toward a Community Model in Legal Judgment
Abstract:
More than 158 years since the abolition of American slavery, the persistent challenge of racial progress in the United States unfolds against a backdrop of nuanced contemporary racism. Understanding the contemporary impact of race requires an exploration of historical racial trauma, particularly within the Black and African American experience. Rooted in 246 years of chattel slavery and a subsequent century of American Apartheid, Black Americans and African Americans continue to grapple with the enduring effects of systemic racism. This enduring reality reveals that the traumatic and harmful effects of racism, racial discrimination, and racial bias manifest beyond the observed differential outcomes in criminal legal systems. These manifestations extend into deep psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual trauma that devalues Black lives, dehumanizes Blackness, and erodes Black communities. Understanding these factors is essential for effective policy and practice implementation.
Further, it illustrates that changing laws alone will not advance racial justice in legal systems without changing the mindset of those who actionize laws. Stated more explicitly, new laws and policies do not obviate the need for critical self-interrogation and analysis that allow us to understand the deeply rooted racism (externalized and internalized) and racial bias that lay dormant within us. Fueled by decades of Community demand for increased transparency, accountability, and motivation for systemic disruption, this paper advocates for a transformative approach, where the Community Model becomes a catalyst for dismantling systemic racism and fostering a legal environment grounded in justice, equity, and communal healing.
Jack Glaser
University of California, Berkeley
Jack Glaser is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Associate Dean of Public Policy from 2013 to 2019. He received his PhD in Psychology from Yale University in 1999. He studies racial and ethnic stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, particularly in the domain of law enforcement. He is an expert on implicit (i.e., nonconscious) bias, and applies that knowledge to policing, in addition to doing in-depth research on police stop and search practices and use of force. Glaser is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Policing Equity, where he has also served as a co-Principal Investigator on the National Justice Database of police stops and use of force. He is a professional advisor to the California Department of Justice on the analysis and interpretation of statewide police stop data, and served as a research advisor to the California Governor’s Office on police use of force policy reform. Glaser has published extensive research on racial disparities in policing, including a book, Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling (Oxford University Press, 2015).
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
Police Discretion as a Vulnerability Factor for Disparate Treatment
Abstract:
It has long been understood that police officers have a high degree of discretion in how they conduct themselves on duty. This is caused in part by the highly localized regulation of policing and the inherent vagueness of the central legal construct governing police contact with civilians – the “reasonable suspicion” standard. Psychological science has demonstrated time and again the many ways that decision making under uncertainty is vulnerable to errors arising from biases and heuristics. High discretion (e.g., wide latitude in how to act) broadens the set of conditions under which one can exercise prerogatives, thereby increasing uncertainty. Because of the relative pervasiveness and robustness of race-crime stereotypes, police, like all of us, are likely to judge and act toward minorities with greater suspicion. Experimental and administrative data bear this out. Short term training to mitigate the resultant disparities in stops, searches, and use of force is unlikely to be effective because people need chronic motives, feasible strategies, and sufficient opportunities to override biases. Until reliable methods to overcome biases can be developed, structural reform must be considered. Policing data consistently shows that disparities are greatest under high discretion. Constraints on discretion have been shown to reduce disparities. Methods to operationalize these constraints in ways to promote fairness and public safety must be developed, tested, and implemented.
Mandeep K. Dhami
Middlesex University
Mandeep K. Dhami, PhD is Professor in Decision Psychology at Middlesex University, London, UK. She previously held positions in the UK (University of Surrey and University of Cambridge), Canada (University of Victoria), USA (University of Maryland) and Germany (Max Planck Institute for Human Development). Mandeep has also worked as a Principal Scientist for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL, UK Ministry of Defence), and has work experience in two British prisons. Mandeep is an internationally recognized expert on human judgment and decision-making, risk perception, and uncertainty communication. Mandeep has authored over 130 scholarly publications and is lead editor of the book ‘Judgment and Decision Making as a Skill’ published by Cambridge University Press. She applies her expertise to solving problems in the legal & criminal justice and defense & security domains, and advises Government bodies nationally and internationally on evidence-based policy and practice. Her research has received several international awards including from the European Association for Decision Making, the American Psychological Association (Division 9), and NATO Science & Technology Organisation. Mandeep is Editor of Judgment and Decision Making, the official journal of both the (US-based) Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the European Association for Decision Making.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
Sentencing Offenders for Multiple Offences: When Seeking Justice is too Cruel, Costly and Cognitively Demanding
Abstract:
Criminal sentencing is arguably one of the most visible parts of the criminal justice process. It is at this final court stage where defendants, their victims and society observe justice in action. However, some of these parties may feel that justice has been denied, especially in cases where an offender is being sentenced for more than one offence (i.e., in what we call multiple-offence/MO cases). This is because sentencing in MO cases differs from sentencing in single-offence (SO) cases. In the latter, the sentence ought to be ‘simply’ the output of a consideration of the characteristics of an offence and offender. By contrast, and putting aside the intricacies of different sentencing laws and policies, there are several general approaches to sentencing in MO cases. Each of these has different advantages and limitations for the pursuit of justice, but all result in sentences for MO cases that are less than what would be passed following a simple cumulative approach (i.e., sentencing each case separately and summing the total to arrive at a final sentence). In this paper, we consider each of the general approaches to sentencing MO cases, namely what we call simplification of a MO case, minimization of some offences in a MO case, and dealing with a MO case its totality. We discuss some of main motives underpinning sentencing in MO cases, and highlight how they may undermine the search for justice. These motives include the desire to avoid cruel sentences (i.e., long-term imprisonment) for offenders who committed multiple less serious offences, reduce the costs associated with long-term imprisonment, and reduce the cognitive demands placed on sentencers who must weight and integrate factors associated with multiple offences. We suggest that our understanding of sentencing in MO cases is hampered by the dearth of past research on this topic and the failure of sentencing researchers to differentiate between MO and SO cases. We review the small body of past research on sentencing in MO cases, and present new empirical findings from the Criminal Court of Appeal for England and Wales that can help fill the existing knowledge gap. Finally, we explore potential alternative approaches to sentencing in MO cases that can help sentencers better achieve justice.
Dan Simon
University of Southern California, Gould School of Law
Dan Simon is the Richard L. and Maria B. Crutcher Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of Southern California, where he holds appointments at the Gould School of Law and the department of psychology. Simon publishes in basic-psychological journals, in legal publications, and in crossover outlets. His book In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process was published by Harvard University Press in 2012, and translated into Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. The book received the 2015 Book Award from the American Psychology-Law Society. Following the publication of In Doubt, Simon has lectured on the psychological dimensions of the criminal justice process to judges, prosecutors and police personnel across the United States, as well as in Israel, Mexico and Korea.
Simon is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Lashing Out: The Psychology of the Carceral State (under contract with Oxford University Press).
Simon has served as a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. He served also on the Human Factors Committee of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) project of developing standards and guidelines for reforming the forensic sciences (2014 – 2020).
Simon earned an SJD degree from Harvard Law School, an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and an LLB from Tel Aviv University. He worked as an attorney for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel as a human rights lawyer on the West Bank. Before joining the USC Gould School of Law in 1999, Simon was a member of the Law faculty of the University of Haifa Law School.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
The Role of Motivation (and It’s Harmful Effects) in Our Adversarial Criminal Procedure
Abstract:
The adversarial legal procedure is widely perceived as a core characteristic of Anglo-American law, and is believed to be best suited to serve the truth-seeking objective of the trial. Underlying the procedure’s core epistemic device is the dialectic exchange of vigorous partisan advocacy. Truth is said to emerge through the sharp clash of proofs presented by adversaries, that is, through zealous advocacy. Indeed, zealous representation is a professional responsibility that lawyers owe their clients. From a psychological point of view, the construct that undergirds zeal is most likely motivation. Motivation can be understood to increase lawyers’ diligence and persuasiveness in preparing and arguing their cases in court. But there is good reason to believe that motivation has numerous other impacts on lawyers’ behaviors. A series of studies on the role-induced bias have shown that the mere assignment to an adversarial role (v. a non-adversarial role) results in a deluge of psychological effects that skew actors’ views of the case towards greater support of their (randomly) assigned roles. This paper focuses in particular on criminal prosecutors, who have an outsized impact on the resolution of criminal cases, and thus also on punishment policy more generally. Studies demonstrate that assignment to an adversarial prosecutorial role results in more incriminatory interpretations of the evidence, heightened judgments of guilt, arousal of negative emotions towards the protagonist, over-believing prosecution witnesses and under-believing the defendant, negative judgments of the adversarial counterpart, a greater willingness to initiate the proceedings, formation of harsher plea offers, and more. Most notably, the adversarial assignment drives up actors’ motivation to win the case, which is found to be strongly correlated with the abovementioned biases. In other words, while motivation might make for better advocacy (a plausible but contestable proposition), it likely has deleterious consequences for the larger process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible contribution of the adversarial bias to mass incarceration, as well as to the prevalent battle model of criminal procedure, the acrimonious relations between prosecutors and defense attorneys, and the phenomenon of prosecutorial misconduct.
Jennifer K. Robbennolt
University of Illinois, College of Law
Jennifer Robbennolt, J.D., Ph.D, is the Associate Dean for Research, the Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology, and Co-Director of the Illinois Program on Law, Behavior and Social Science at the University of Illinois College of Law. Professor Robbennolt is an expert in the areas of psychology and law, torts, and dispute resolution. Her research integrates psychological theory and methods into the study of law, legal institutions, and legal practice, focusing primarily on legal decision making and the use of empirical research methodology in law. She is co-author of several books, including The Psychology of Tort Law; Psychology for Lawyers: Understanding the Human Factors in Negotiation, Litigation, and Decision Making; Dispute Resolution and Lawyers; and Empirical Methods in Law.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
Accountability, Apologies, and Amends: Motives for Justice
Abstract:
Few injured persons bring tort claims. Those who do claim have a variety of justice motives. They may want compensation; deterrence or reform; information and explanations; acknowledgement of the wrong, its consequences, and their standing; apologies; or punishment. Those who don’t claim often have similar desires but face a variety of barriers to claiming as well. This presentation will explore these motives and barriers and assess the paths to justice provided (and not provided) by the formal and informal processes of tort law.
Donna Shestowsky
University of California, Davis, School of Law
Donna Shestowsky is Professor of Law and Director of the Lawyering Skills Education Program at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. She is also a faculty member of the Graduate Group in Psychology at UC Davis. Her main research objective is to examine basic assumptions underlying the structure of the legal system and to explore ways in which the legal system might be improved using the methodological and analytic tools of psychological theory and research.
Dr. Shestowsky was the sole principal investigator of a multi-year research project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Association, which examined how litigants evaluate legal procedures. One article based on this work was awarded the 2016 Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award; another article was awarded the Best Article of 2018 in the field of dispute resolution from the AALS Section on Alternative Dispute Resolution.
Dr. Shestowsky's legal and psychological commentary has appeared in national sources such as CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. She advises courts in the development of court-connected ADR programs. Her research has been published in top journals in both Psychology and Law, including the Stanford Law Review, Law and Human Behavior, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She is dedicated to helping legal practitioners make use of empirical research. To that end, she also publishes in journals with broader audiences, such as Court Review and Dispute Resolution Magazine.
Dr. Shestowsky was awarded a J.D. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. During the 2003-2004 academic year, she was jointly appointed to the faculty at Northwestern University School of Law and the Kellogg School of Management. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2021, and currently serves as Chair-Elect of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Alternative Dispute Resolution.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
What Motivates People to Use ADR?
Abstract:
Long gone are the days when civil cases were presumed destined for trial. Since the 1990s, Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has revolutionized the legal landscape, with over ninety-five percent of cases now resolving through other procedures, including negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. Why do people use ADR? While ADR's historical and political context offers one explanation for its popularity, psychological factors present another interesting take. And, in situations where civil litigants have the autonomy to decide whether or not to engage in ADR at all, or at least choose the specific ADR procedure that will be used to resolve their dispute, their motivations take center stage.
My article delves into the relevant empirical research, shedding light on why people are drawn to ADR and what motivates them to use it. My analysis aims to untangle the connections amongst disparate strands of work: laboratory and field studies on litigants' procedural preferences, research on the procedures that litigants contemplate after their cases have been filed, and studies exploring the factors influencing their ultimate decisions regarding which procedures to use. Furthermore, my analysis suggests that emerging research on the influence of attorneys in shaping client decisions implies a need to explore motivations not solely from an individual perspective, as the relevant research as done thus far, but through a dyadic lens that recognizes the distinct dynamics of the lawyer-client relationship.
Kees van den Bos
Utrecht University
Kees van den Bos is Professor of Social Psychology and Professor of Empirical Legal Science at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The research program that colleagues and he developed focuses on the combination of social psychology and empirical legal studies pertaining to trust in law and other institutions, and the role of perceived justice in this process. The resulting research program systematically addresses fundamental questions pertaining to the experience of (in)justice and issues of culture within and between societies. Kees has published more than 250 publications, including several publications in high-impact journals, monographs on Why People Radicalize (2018) and The Fair Process Effect (2023), and a textbook on Empirical Legal Research (2020).
He received his Ph.D. cum laude at Leiden University in 1996, won a dissertation award of the Association of Dutch Social Psychologists, and obtained several competitive research grants, including a VICI grant from the Dutch national science foundation, and several research grants from Dutch ministries. He was an associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the European Journal of Social Psychology, and Social Justice Research. A former chair of his department for several years, Kees was the Psychology Teacher of the Year in 2009, 2010, and 2018 at Utrecht University. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He frequently advises governmental agencies on the insights that follow from his research program.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
Getting More and More Insight into Justice and Culture
Abstract:
In this paper, I focus on the issue of justice and culture. I argue that justice motivates people because fair and just treatment signals that your culture, and important persons (such as judges and other societal authorities) and social institutions (such as law) in that culture, view you as a person that matters and is valued. In contrast, unfair and unjust treatment symbolizes that you are not a full-fledged and valued part of your culture. I review findings that suggested that justice judgments may be invariant across cultures. I then discuss more recent insights that suggest social distance between participants and interviewers from the status quo (such as those coming from law schools and other university departments) may have resulted in missing important cultural differences in people’s trust in law. I further note that the field of legal judgment and justice issues may have been relying too much on insights from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic participants and interviewers. I close by pointing out how studying cross-cultural effect by means of experimental control may help to get more robust insight into the important issue of justice and culture.
Tom Tyler
Yale Law School
Tom Tyler is the Macklin-Fleming Professor of Law at Yale University. His research concerns authority dynamics in groups, organizations, communities and societies and he has studied these issues in legal, political and managerial settings. He has been concerned with the role of procedural justice in creating and sustaining legitimacy. His books include Why People Obey the Law; Cooperation in Groups; Trust in the Law; Why people cooperate; Why children follow rules; and Legitimacy-based policing and the promotion of community vitality.
2024 Motivation Symposium Talk Title:
Is Ideological Polarization a Threat to Procedural Justice-based Legitimacy: The Case of Elections
Abstract:
An important contribution of social psychology to the study of legal and political authority has been the demonstration that the roots of legitimacy lie in people’s evaluations of the justice of the procedures used by legal and political actors to exercise their authority when making and implementing policies and practices. Procedural justice also plays a key role in legitimating decisions about who becomes a leader, with elections being a widely used “fair” procedure for selecting authorities. Political scientists regard the willingness of those who do not win elections to continue to trust and support the system (loser’s consent) as pivotal to the success of democracies. Recent events have made the lack of loser’s consent a highly visible political issue in America and raised questions about why it occurs and its implications for democratic governance. This paper explores the degree to which ideological polarization and authoritarian values undermine the procedural justice-based legitimacy of post-election law and governance.