Taus v. Loftus: Determining the Legal Ground Rules for Scholarly Inquiry
Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice, Vol. 9, pp. 147-162, 2009
17 Pages Posted: 29 Oct 2009 Last revised: 5 Aug 2010
Abstract
A published article by Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer (2002) examined the claim of a psychiatrist that “Jane Doe,” interviewed at age 5 and then 11 years later, had recovered a repressed memory of sexual abuse by her mother. The Loftus-Guyer article resulted in a lawsuit by the young woman who claimed invasions of privacy, defamation, and other injuries. This article details the history of the lawsuit and attends in particular to the tension between free speech as a scholarly right and the role of the courts and of Institutional Review Boards, both of which played a prominent role in regard to the research enterprise.
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