Foreword: Adjudicating the Guilty Mind

Abstract:     
In May 2011, a group of scholars gathered at Duke University School of Law for a conference on "Adjudicating the Guilty Mind." That discussion started from the premise that making dispositive mental state determinations in the criminal justice system requires greater sophistication with respect to both substance and procedure. The Symposium issue introduced in this Foreword seeks to bring different methodologies and perspectives to bear on the difficult question of how the public perceives culpability, how the law defines it, and how the justice system identifies it in a given case. Looking through various lenses — including social and cognitive psychology, moral philosophy, economics, and empirical studies of jury decisionmaking and judicial behavior — the authors offer new ideas about what the criminal law’s increasingly heavy reliance on mental state means and requires.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 5

Accepted Paper Series