Free press vs. fair trials

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Ingwer Borg, Patrick J. F. Groenen, Patrick Mair

This book introduces MDS as a psychological model and as a data analysis technique for the applied researcher. It also discusses, in detail, how to use two MDS programs, Proxscal (a module of SPSS) and Smacof (an R-package). The book is unique in its orientation on the applied researcher, whose primary interest is in using MDS as a tool to build substantive theories. This is done by emphasizing practical issues (such as evaluating model fit), by presenting ways to enforce theoretical expectations on the MDS solution, and by discussing typical mistakes that MDS users tend to make. The primary audience of this book are psychologists, social scientists, and market researchers. No particular background knowledge is required, beyond a basic knowledge of statistics.

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Christopher Slobogin

The author proposes a number of ways the courts can ensure that experts provide the best possible information about ultimately unknowable past mental states and future behavior, arguing that a rigorous demonstration of scientific validity from expert witnesses may often be unfair and can diminish the process's reliability.

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Karl N. Llewellyn

Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice compiles many of Llewellyn's most important writings. For his time, the thirties through the fifties, Llewellyn offered fresh approaches to the study of law and society. Although these writings might not seem innovative today, because they have become widely applied in the contemporary world, they remain a testament to his. The ideas he advanced many decades ago have now become commonplace among contemporary jurisprudence scholars as well as social scientists studying law and legal issues. Legal realism, the ground of Llewellyn's theory, attempts to contextualize the practice of law. Its proponents argue that a host of extra-legal factors--social, cultural, historical, and psychological, to name a few--are at least as important in determining legal outcomes as are the rules and principles by which the legal system operates. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., book, The Common Law, is regarded as the founder of legal realism. Holmes stated that in order to truly understand the workings of law, one must go beyond technical (or logical) elements entailing rules and procedures. The life of the law is not only that which is embodied in statutes and court decisions guided by procedural law. Law is just as much about experience: about flesh-and-blood human beings doings things together and making decisions. Llewellyn's version of legal realism was heavily influenced by Pound and Holmes. The distinction between "law in books" and "law in action" is an acknowledgement of the gap that exists between law as embodied in criminal, civil, and administrative code books, and law. A fully formed legal realism insists on studying the behavior of legal practitioners, including their practices, habits, and techniques of action as well as decision-making about others. This classic studyis a foremosthistorical work on legal theory, and is essential for understanding the roots of this influential perspective.

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Gerhard Roth

On the basis of evolutionary and behavioral biology, neuroscience and anthropology, this book investigates to which extent it is possible to reconstruct the evolution of nervous systems and brains as well as of mental-cognitive abilities, in short “intelligence”, and to which extent we can correlate the one with the other. One central question is, whether or not abilities exist that make humans truly unique, or whether the evolution of the human mind was a gradual process. Exactly which neural features make animals and humans intelligent and creative? Is it absolute or relative brain size or the size of “intelligence centers” inside the brains, the number of nerve cells inside the brain in total or in such “intelligence centers” decisive for the degree of intelligence, of mind and eventually consciousness? Which are the driving forces behind these processes? Here, many different answers exist.^ For some experts the driving force for brains and minds are the conditions for biological survival: the more complex these conditions, the more effective need to be sense organs, nervous systems and brains, and the stronger is the tendency to an increase in learning abilities, behavioral flexibility and innovation power of animals. This is the ecological intellicence hypothesis. Other authors believe that the true driving force is the challenge from social life of an animal: the more complex the social conditions, the more sophisticated are abilities such as social learning, imitation, empathy, knowledge transfer, consciousness and the development of a theory of mind and meta-cognition. This, again, needs progressive changes inside the brains. This is the social intelligence hypothesis. Again other authors distinguish physical intelligence as a third form of cognitive functions mostly related to tool use, tool fabrication and understanding of the principles of how things work.^ Finally, some experts believe that the decisive factor in the evolution of brains and minds consisted in an increase in the speed and efficacy of information processing in cognitive brain centers. This is the general intelligence or information processing hypothesis. It is discussed, which of these hypotheses is the most convincing one. At its end, the book deals with the eminent question of whether we can arrive at a naturalistic concept of mind and consciousness. Is it possible to explain mind and intelligence within the framework of the natural science, or do mind and intelligence as found in humans, transcend nature?