Colloquium on Law and Psychology

Course Instructors

Professor Avani Mehta Sood

Course Information

Fall 2026

Thursday, 4:45–6:45 p.m.
Vanderbilt Hall, Room 208

LAW-LW.11049.001 | 1 Credit

RSVP to ams9262@nyu.edu if you plan to attend, although drop-ins are also welcome.

The Colloquium on Law & Psychology will introduce students to innovative empirical scholarship at the intersection of law and psychology, with a focus this semester on topics relating to criminal law. Generally, each session will begin with a research presentation by a guest speaker, followed by Q&A and discussion.

 

October 15

Avani Mehta Sood
NYU School of Law
Professor of Law 
Faculty Affiliate in Psychology
Law & Psychology Lab

Verdict Format on Trial: Experimental Tests of the Criminal Law’s Orthodoxy

For centuries, American criminal courts have overwhelmingly favored “general” verdicts over “special” verdicts, without giving the latter a fair trial. A general verdict requires criminal jurors to deliver only an ultimate judgment of “guilty” or “not guilty” on a charged offense. In contrast, a special verdict would require jurors to answer a sequence of questions about whether each legal element of the charged offense has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt before they deliver a final judgment. The criminal law’s conventional wisdom holds that special verdicts will disadvantage defendants by constraining jurors’ latitude to temper or nullify the law, thereby increasing the likelihood of conviction. However, this longstanding assumption—cemented into current doctrine by United States v. Spock, a leading but factually atypical precedent—has never been put to an experimental test.

Confronting the criminal law’s orthodoxy with original data, this Article presents the first published experiments examining how verdict format affects  American mock jurors’ determinations of criminal liability. The experiments are informed by legal, historical, and psychological analyses, as well as by findings from a nationwide survey of more than 1,600 judges, litigators, jury-eligible lay citizens, and other stakeholders in the American legal system.

… The experimental findings suggest that criminal verdict format implicates potential trade-offs among values that bear on the power and promise of the criminal jury, including due process, equality, legal transparency, lay mercy, and adjudicative autonomy. The Article proposes concrete pathways—through procedural reform, comparative legal analysis, and further research—to navigate these normative tensions and promote a more empirically grounded and psychologically informed system of criminal jury adjudication.

 

October 22

Joshua Knobe
Yale University
Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Linguistics

Experimental Work on Attributions of Intention

Ordinary people, with no specialized training in the law, have certain criteria for determining whether an agent acted with intention, and a large body of experimental research has explored these criteria. Surprisingly, these experiments consistently find that the moral status of a behavior plays a role in people's ordinary judgments about whether an agent acted with intention. In other words, people's judgments about whether an agent had an intention to perform behavior A depend in part on whether they regard A as something morally good or something morally bad. In this presentation, I will be discussing different views about what explains this effect and exploring the legal implications of different possible explanations. The empirical questions here remain very much open, with different researchers offering very different views, and I will be very interested to hear students' own suggestions about what might be explaining this effect.

Gregory Antill
University of Connecticut School of Law
Associate Professor of Law

Calculating Culpability

Criminal law is concerned not just with proscribing certain forms of wrongful conduct, but also with determining and assessing a defendant’s degree of culpability, or guilt, in acting wrongfully. The criminal law’s approach to mens rea doctrine; affirmative defenses such as insanity, youth, and duress; and mitigation guidelines in sentencing all help serve this function. As such, a legal system’s choice of doctrinal regimes in these areas commits it to a certain picture of the kinds of psychological capacities involved in human agency and the degree to which those capacities matter morally.

 

This project seeks to critically examine the ways in which the criminal law calculates culpability – in particular, American law’s employment of the standard Purpose, Knowledge, Recklessness, and Negligence mens rea hierarchy – and the degree to which the picture of culpability which the law enshrines comports with our most plausible theories of culpability from philosophy and psychology. As part of that critical examination, it aims to develop and defend a novel account of criminal culpability centered on reluctant wrongdoing, rather than intentional wrongdoing, and to show how we might craft an administrable criminal code grounded in such a ‘reluctance-based’ account.

 

October 29

Deborah Denno
Fordham School of Law
Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law
Director of the Neuroscience and Law Center

The Neuroscience Study: Coding a Person’s Life and The Worst Thing They Ever Did

[Chapter 3 in Changing Law’s Mind: How Neuroscience Can Help Us Punish Criminals More Fairly and Effectively (Oxford University Press, book in progress)]

 

 A criminal justice system should protect society from crime and punish criminals in proportion to their blameworthiness. My in-progress book, Changing Law’s Mind, contends that new insights about the brain can help us in the quest to construct a fairer and more effective criminal justice system. Recent neuroscientific discoveries suggest that some of our previous assumptions about human thinking and culpability fail to reflect the reality of how the brain functions. If we ignore these developments, we risk perpetuating a system that unjustly punishes some people. Yet, much of the controversy surrounding the intersection of neuroscience and criminal law stems from simplistic and wrong-headed myths about neuroscientific evidence, and also how judges, jurors, attorneys, and testifying experts in all disciplines use it in court.

 

To add insight into this quandary, this book presents key results from an analysis of my "Neuroscience Study," an original dataset comprising every criminal case in the United States (over 8,000 cases) that addressed social neuroscientific evidence in any capacity over twelve decades (1900-2020). The discussion focuses on insanity cases, given the insanity doctrine’s stability across all decades and the doctrine’s systematic reliance on neuroscientific factors, such as brain damage and mental illness. Changing Law’s Mind also provides readers with a foundation in both legal doctrine and neuroscience, using that linkage as a bridge to question the criminal law’s underlying principles and practice, starting from the moment a case is processed in the system to the point at which a defendant is sentenced and punished. 

 

The rise of artificial intelligence will bring a whole new set of concerns that a grounding in neuroscience will help us anticipate. Yet one central concern that the Neuroscience Study highlights is who controls the narrative—who can best address the human need for definitive answers to age-old questions: good versus evil, guilty versus not guilty, mitigation versus retribution, sanity versus insanity. Based on this assessment, the book suggests ways in which the criminal law can change—either quickly by incorporating our new understanding of the human mind into current practice, or more fundamentally by making long-term modifications to criminal law doctrine.

 

Chapter 3, the basis for my talk, explains in detail how my team and I came up with the framework and coding procedures for the 12-decade Neuroscience Study and presents some of the key findings. I have taken a more personal approach to describing the process because of the study's complexity and to show the importance of hand coding. My team and I extensively trained the coders, all JD students, to ensure a systematic and reliable dataset of long and dense cases. The chapter’s second part describes the process and significant discoveries from the book’s Insanity Defense Study, which analyzed in detail the several thousand insanity cases from the larger Neuroscience Study. The book focuses on insanity cases because most of them involve brain damage or abnormality and thus rely heavily on neuroscientific evidence, providing the most comprehensive long-term study of insanity available. It’s this dataset that aids our pursuit to understand who should control the narrative in answering the criminal justice system’s essential questions.

 

November 5

Shirin Bakhshay
UCLA School of Law
Assistant Professor of Law

The Dilemma of Parental Care and Control in the Era of Mass School Shootings

The United States is facing an epidemic of gun violence and a youth mental health crisis, which has led to a rise in mass school shootings by adolescents. In response, prosecutors have extended the criminal law’s reach beyond the direct perpetrator—the shooter—to their parents. Parental criminal liability is not new but is being pursued with more regularity and zeal as incidences of mass school shootings and other types of youth-related harm become more visible. Extending criminal culpability and punishment to parents may be a momentary salve, but it is contradicted by psychological science about parental attitudes, beliefs, and capacity to control their children’s behavior. Placing liability for children’s intentional acts of violence on parents misunderstands their ability to appreciate the risk their child may pose and shifts the onus of responsibility for keeping the public, and especially schoolchildren, safe from state and institutional actors onto individual parents who lack the training, resources, and support to be effective stewards of public safety in the modern era.

This Article offers a three-part critique of parental criminal liability for the independent acts of their children, arguing that it is doctrinally problematic, normatively misguided, and empirically unsupported. It takes as its exemplar People v. Crumbley, where the parents of a Michigan school shooter were convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter for their son’s intentional criminal actions. It argues that the Crumbley case ignores psychological research and socio-cultural parenting norms in ways that upend principles of mens rea and causation. The psychological literature has found that parents are unlikely to correctly interpret signs of mental health issues in their children and, in the absence of overt displays of aggression, are unlikely to realize that their child may act violently or pose a risk to others. The Article analyzes this doctrinal mismatch and explains how it led to an improper finding of reasonable foreseeability and proximate causation in the Crumbley case that has the potential to expand parental liability going forward. It argues that, to the extent parental criminal liability is pursued at all, it should be guided by psychological research on parent-child relationships. 

 

November 12

Justin Levinson
University of Hawai’i at Manoa School of Law
Cades Foundation Professor of Law
Director of the Culture and Jury Project

Implicit Racial Bias: Criminal Punishment and Constitutional Protection

How does implicit racial bias shape who is punished and who is protected? This presentation brings together two recent articles, expert witness work in California Racial Justice Act cases, and an ongoing empirical study to examine how racial bias becomes embedded in criminal law and perceptions of constitutional rights.

The first article argues that implicit racial bias operates synergistically through capital statutes and processes and through the unfettered discretion of lawyers, judges, and jurors, concluding that continued tinkering with the “machinery of death” can no longer be justified. The second reports a national study finding that Three Strikes laws leverage automatic associations of repeat criminality with Black and Latino people while inviting explicit biases to operate, raising the question whether repeat offender laws should be retained.

 

The presentation then turns to the application of implicit bias research in California's Racial Justice Act cases and to a new study examining whether certain constitutional rights are implicitly perceived as belonging to White people. Using a novel Implicit Association Test, the study investigates whether, in the Second Amendment context, associations with constitutional protection give way to associations with criminality when people think about Black rather than White people. Together, these projects explore the relationship between racialized punishment and racialized protection, and the possibilities and challenges of bringing empirical knowledge of bias into the courtroom.

 

November 19

Dan Simon
USC Gould School of Law
Richard L. and Maria B. Crutcher Professor of Law and Psychology

The Complex Psychology of Retribution

The canonic justifications of punishment are the centerpiece of the legitimation of criminal punishment. Retribution, in particular, is billed by its adherents as the most moral justification in that it is said to be most respectful of human dignity, constrained, lenient, and dispassionate. In a study of a representative sample of 948 US respondents, we identified those who are most disposed towards retributivism (classified in four ways) and compared them to the other respondents on a broad range of measures. We find that the retributivist respondents fall far short of the claims made by retributive scholars in that they are more punitive, more hateful of people who have committed crimes, more supportive of revenge, degradation, and harsh prison conditions, more accepting of prison violence, more supportive of LWOP and of the death penalty, and more willing to compromise due process protections. They are also more inclined to kill a (random) shark following a lethal shark attack and to support its painful death. We also find that they differ on various personality measures: they exhibit more Racial Resentment, Social Dominance, and Authoritarianism. Normative implications and objections will be discussed.