Academic

Kahan, Hoffman, & Braman on Scott v. Harris

By Lawrence Solum

Dan M. Kahan (Yale University - Law School), David A. Hoffman (Temple University - James E. Beasley School of Law) & Donald Braman (George Washington University - Law School) have posted Whose Eyes are You Going to Believe? An Empirical (and Normative) Assessment of Scott v. Harris on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This paper accepts the unusual invitation to see for yourself issued by the Supreme Court in Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769 (2007). Scott held that a police officer did not violate the Fourth Amendment when he deliberately rammed his car into that of a fleeing motorist who refused to pull over for speeding and instead attempted to evade the police in a high-speed chase. The majority did not attempt to rebut the arguments of the single Justice who disagreed with its conclusion that no reasonable juror could find the fleeing driver did not pose a deadly risk to the public. Instead, the Court uploaded to its website a video of the chase, filmed from inside the pursuing police cruisers, and invited members of the public to make up their own minds after viewing it. We showed the video to a diverse sample of 1,350 Americans. Overall a majority agreed with the Court's resolution of the key issues, but within the sample there were sharp differences of opinion along cultural, ideological, and other lines. We attribute these divisions to the psychological disposition of individuals to resolve disputed facts in a manner supportive of their group identities. The paper also addresses the normative significance of these findings. The result in the case, we argue, might be defensible, but the Court's reasoning was not. By insisting there was only one reasonable view of facts, the Court needlessly invested its decision with culturally partisan overtones that detracted from the decision's legitimacy.

And a bit from the text:

The results of our study strongly confirmed our hypotheses. With the exception of whether the police should have initiated a high-speed chase?a matter on which subjects sharply disagree?reactions to the Scott tape reflect constrained dissensus. A very sizable majority of our diverse, nationally representative sample agreed with the Scott majority that Harris?s driving exposed the public and the police to lethal risks, that Harris was more at fault than the police for putting the public in danger, and that deadly force ultimately was reasonable to terminate the chase. However, dissent from these perceptions and evaluations was not random; the minority of subjects who disagreed about the appropri-ateness of deadly force were connected by a core of identity-defining characteristics. Indeed, so too were members of a minority who formed a view of the facts most unequivocally in line with those the Scott majority.

The relationship between these perceptions, on the one hand, and the relevant group identities, on the other, fits our hypothesis that reactions to the Scott tape would be shaped by various sources of value-motivated cognition. As we predicted, characteristics such as race, in-come, education, political ideology and political-party affiliation all sig-nificantly contributed to variation in perceptions of the risks at issue in Scott. Subjects differing along these lines tended toward the view of the facts that best cohered with emotional appraisals one would expect per-sons of those sorts to experience in relation to the contested social meanings inherent in an encounter between police and an individual citizen. Although gender mattered less than we predicted, we did find, as expected, that in evaluating Harris?s driving women did not display the greater sensitivity to risk that has been observed in many other set-tings.

An important and fascinating paper.  My off-the-cuff reaction is that this paper suggests a whole line of empirical research on the appropriateness of summary judgment (or at least research on factors relevant to appropriateness) in a variety of situation types.

Highly recommended.  Download it while its hot!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 10, 2008 (boomark / email).