By Julius Yam 

Authoritarianism has significant implications for how judges should discharge their duties. How should judges committed to constitutionalism conduct themselves when under authoritarian pressure? To answer this question,the article proposes a two-step adjudicative framework, documents a variety of judicial strategies, and proposes how principles and strategies can and should be incorporated into the framework in different scenarios. The first step of the adjudicative framework involves judges identifying the ‘formal legal position’ while blindfolding themselves to extra-legal factors (such as potential authoritarian backlash). In the second step, depending on the level of risk incurred by maintaining the formal legal position, judges should lift the blindfold to check whether, and if so how, the formal legal position should be supplemented with or adjusted by judicial strategies. Through this analysis, the article offers a guide to judicial reasoning under authoritarianism 

Modern Law Review Limited.(2023) 00(0) MLR 

By Brandon L. Garrett; William E. Crozier.; and Rebecca Grady

Forensic examiners regularly testify in criminal cases, informing the jurors whether crime scene evidence likely came from a source. In this study, we examine the impact of providing jurors with testimony further qualified by error rates and likelihood ratios, for expert testimony concerning two forensic disciplines: commonly used fingerprint comparison evidence and a novel technique involving voice comparison. Our method involved surveying mock jurors in Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 897 laypeople) using written testimony and judicial instructions. Participants were more skeptical of voice analysis and generated fewer “guilty” decisions than for fingerprint analysis (B = 2.00, OR = 7.06, p = <0.000). We found that error rate information most strongly decreased “guilty” votes relative to no qualifying information for participants who heard fingerprint evidence (but not those that heard voice analysis evidence; B = 1.16, OR = 0.32, p = 0.007). We also found that error rates and conclusion types led to a greater decrease on “guilty” votes for fingerprint evidence than voice evidence (B = 1.44, OR = 4.23, p = 0.021). We conclude that these results suggest jurors adjust the weight placed on forensic evidence depending on their prior views about its reliability. Future research should develop testimony and judicial instructions that can better inform jurors of the strengths and limitations of forensic evidence.

Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2020