Legal Commentary

One of my favorite writers, Martin Gardner, wrote (years ago) of an interesting fact: in percentage terms, more physicists believed in ESP than did psychologists.  The difference was small, and both groups overwhelmingly did not believe; something like 94% of psychologists and 88% of physicists were nonbelievers, if memory serves.

Gardner?s explanation (again, from memory) was that psychologists were intimately familiar with the way people delude both themselves and others, and accordingly skeptical of ESP accounts.  Physicists, in contrast, were largely nonbelievers, but were not quite as confident that ESP ?evidence? was the product of delusion, confusion, or fraud.

I don?t believe ESP exists.  Maybe I?m wrong.  But assuming I?m right (as I like to do), for me the above is interesting because physicists had more of a blind spot than psychologists on an issue where, at first take, you might expect physicists to have better access to the truth.  I often wonder: on what issues or in what areas do legal academics have blurrier vision than would be expected?  I realize the question is a bit poorly defined, but I think the gist is clear enough. Where are we blinder than we think? (No credit for answers like ?haircuts? or ?fashion.?)