Call For Papers: Association of American Law Schools, Section of Law and the Humanities, 2016 Meeting

The AALS Section of Law and the Humanities has issued the following CFP for the 2016 Meeting.

The following is a Call for Papers issued by the Section of Law and the Humanities:

"In the past three decades, significant research links assumptions based on race, ethnicity, and gender to views of individuals and their capacities.

“One example of such research is through use of the Implicit Association Test, available at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html,

and discussed in, Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz, “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, p. 1464 (1998); Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (Delacorte, 2013).

“Another example is through the use of “blind” and “double-blind” testing.  See, e.g., Corinne A Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoli, Mark J. Graham, and Jo Andelsman, “Science Faculty’s Suble Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, no. 109, no. 41, pp. 16474-16479 (2012)

“More generally, the relationships among perception, sight, knowledge, and judgment have spawned a debate about how to develop wise judgment.

“At the Annual Meeting of the AALS, the Section on Law and the Humanities wishes to explore how implicit bias operates in courtrooms and how its operation has an impact on the participation of and outcomes for women and minorities as litigants.  Among other possible topics, we are interested in how partiality or impartiality in the courtroom is represented; how judicial impartiality is performed; and how bias is visible not only in judicial decisionmaking but in ways such as court composition.  Areas of interest include anti-discrimination, in which the protected class status of women and minorities plays a role, and also criminal law, family law, and immigration, among others.

“At this stage, the Section invites abstracts of proposed papers that address one of the described topics. The Section's Executive Committee will select among the abstracts and request that the proponents make a twenty-minute presentation at the Section’s meeting during the AALS Annual Meeting, January 7-9, 2016, in New York.  We request also that those who make presentations commit to publication of papers summarized at the Meeting.  We, in turn, commit to seek publication in an appropriate journal.

"Please submit an abstract of a proposed paper by April 15 to Dr. Neil H. Cogan, ncogan@law.whittier.edu."