Closing argument

Abstract: In the legal system, jurors are asked to render a decision after the event in question has already occurred and the final outcome, typically negative, is known. This “after-the-fact” structure of the legal system makes jurors susceptible to a human judgment phenomenon known as hindsight bias. This study focused on reducing hindsight bias in a courtroom context by incorporating a debiasing strategy within the defense's closing argument. Subjects viewed one of three videotaped versions of plaintiff and defense closing arguments in a commercial litigation case (i.e., foresight condition, hindsight condition, and hindsight debiasing condition). Results indicate that the hindsight debiasing strategy was effective in reducing subject-juror hindsight bias.

Abstract: This article presents, first, two arguments in the mode of development discourse analysis. Development thinking is usually regarded as an offshoot of the family of notions of evolution and progress and as part of western notions of change as growth. On the basis of a genealogy of development theory, this perspective is questioned. It displays an essentialism of ideas, overlooks discontinuities within western thought, exaggerates the special character of western notions of change, and privileges endogenous over exogenous change. The second argument is to view development theories in the plural ‐ diverging in terms of sociology and economics and in relation to different sectors. In each of these spheres different theories have been prevalent. In development theory, endogenous models of development have predominated to the neglect of diffusionist perspectives. The closing argument concerns the challenge of globalization, seeks to redefine development as global development, and argues for an in‐betwe...

Abstract: Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic, this essay explores the production of legal meanings about criminal responsibility in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, it examines the honor-based defense of the "unwritten law" as it was articulated in relation to the formal law of provocation in the 19th century, and in the 1906 trial of Harry K- Thaw for the murder of Stanford White. Meanings about criminal responsibility emerge, I argue, from a process of discursive conflict and negotiation between the domains of legal consciousness and formal law. At trial, competing narratives of indictment and exoneration literally enact that dynamic process, so that trials may be said to be the materialization of the dialogic production of "law" in its broadest sense. In his closing argument to the jury in Harry Kendall Thaw's first trial for the 1906 murder of renowned New York architect Stanford White, Thaw's attorney Delphin Delmas argued that his client should be acquitted on the basis of what he called "dementia americana," "that species of insanity which makes every home sacred ... which makes a man believe that the honor of his wife is sacred ... which makes him believe that whoever invades the sanctity of that home ... whoever stains the virtue of that wife has forfeited the protection of human laws and must look to the eternal justice and mercy of God."1 At first glance Delmas's oxymoronic appeal, one that couples competing medical and moral conceptions of responsibility in an attempt to persuade the jury to acquit Thaw of murder, appears to exemplify what historian Lawrence Friedman (1993:398) has called, in describing Thaw's trials, "a carnival of scandal mixed with psychiatric mumbo jumbo." As the country's first "trial of the century," Thaw's proceedings were most certainly the "super-sensation" Friedman suggests. They manifested in full all the show-trial trappings with which we are now so familiar: the crowds and the cameras; the scandalous revelations of unseemly private behavior, inevitably made into fodder for moralists; the legal maneuvering and posturing and the ensuing public skepticism of law's ability to do justice. And yet to assimilate Delmas's oxymoronic claims to the atmosphere of carnival surrounding such trials, and thus to dismiss those claims as just so much mumbo jumbo, is to detach such trials from both "law" in its graver aspects and the serious cultural anxieties that infect and inform trials. It is, in other words, to deny any significance, legal or cultural, to the spectacular trial except insofar as it "provides the public with a vicarious thrill" (Friedman 1993:398). What would it mean to take such a show trial seriously as a site of law? How might we begin to theorize such trials as spaces in which, far from being irrelevant or evicted by the irrational dynamics of spectacle, law is enacted in critical, if peculiar, ways? In this essay I begin to answer that question through the lens of Harry Thaw's trials by exploring the conditions of possibility that produced Delphin Delmas's honor-based argument to the jury in the first of Thaw's two trials for Stanford White's murder. The proceedings ended with a hung jury in spite of what might be construed as Delmas's appeal to nullify the law via a defense known as the "unwritten law." The important question for my purposes, however, is not why Delmas failed to gain Thaw's acquittal, but rather how he was able to raise such a defense plausibly in the first instance; that is, how we might understand his argument not as "mumbo jumbo" but as marking a deep instability in the law of criminal responsibility at the turn of the century. In its attempt to map the terrain of that instability, this essay offers a meditation on the role of narrative in law and, in particular, on the dynamics of narrative within the legal domain of the trial. The trial, I argue, is a distinctive domain for the production of legal meaning. …

Abstract: In 1976, five years after his death, serious charges were leveled against the distinguished British scientist Sir Cyril Burt. His research on the nature of intelligence was challenged as fraudulent by a number of respected commentators, among them Leon Kamin, Oliver Gillie, Ann and Alan Clarke, and Leslie Hearnshaw. The evidence they marshaled, and the charges themselves are examined here in scrupulous detail. Written as a straightforward defense of Burt, this volume also tells a second story: the intrusion of the mass media into science, the power of the new media, and the success of this invasion, which threatens to replace intellectual authority. Convinced that a great injustice had been done, Fletcher examines each of the charges in detail, subjecting each of Burt's detractors to a symbolic cross-examination. He exposes carelessness and errors of interpretation, and reveals areas of evidence the critics failed to take into account. Each interrogation ends with a list of questions that call for clear public answer. Fletcher's closing argument calls for the restoration of Burt's reputation, so that justice is done. The broader significance of this case study goes far beyond the Burt controversy itself, and has implications for the conduct of science in an increasingly contentious social environment. Fletcher describes how ideology, in alliance with a receptive popular journalism and the media, is able to establish itself as a powerful third force in scientific discourse. The Burt Affair demonstrates what happens when the media establish a viewpoint that permeates not only the scientific community, but also entrenches that perspective so thoroughly in public understanding that its assumptions are not even questioned.