Judges are afforded considerable discretion in decision-making. Through their exercise of discretion, judges construct society's notion of crime and justice. This study examined 61 lay judges' bail decision-making in the English criminal justice system. The law states that in particular cases decisions to grant bail or remand in custody should be based on the risk of a defendant absconding, off...

This Article considers whether differences in methods of judicial selection should influence how judges approach statutory interpretation. Courts and scholars have not given this question much sustained attention, but most would probably embrace the “unified model,” according to which appointed judges (such as federal judges) and elected judges (such as many state judges) are supposed to approa...

Twenty trial court judges were surveyed to determine what information they considered pertinent in psychiatric examinations for competence. These judges showed a clear understanding of what they were asking for in ordering the examinations but also showed a significant tendency to use the competency exam to advise them about other issues in addition (e.g., dangerousness or the need for treatmen...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a tutorial of data analysis methods for answering questions that arise in analyzing data from wine-tasting events: (i) measuring agreement of two judges and its extension tom judges; (ii) making comparisons of judges across years; (iii) comparing two wines; (iv) designing tasting procedures to reduce burden of multiple tastings; (v) ranking of judges; and...

This is a slightly revised version of the MacDermott Lecture delivered (virtually) at Queen’s University, Belfast, on 27 May 2021.

The purpose of the study was to determine how often Maryland judges agreed with the opinions of forensic evaluators in deciding whether to transfer youthful defendants to juvenile court from adult court and to investigate which factors were most important in the opinions of the evaluators and the final decisions of the judges. Data were extracted from a sample of 200 waiver evaluations, and cas...