Social science evidence has played a significant role in American law since Louis Brandeis argued the case of Muller v Oregon in 1907. Today, social science evidence is frequently offered in court for one of three reasons. First, social science evidence is offered to determine disputed facts in a specific case (e.g., to identify the extent of consumer confusion in a trademark case). Second, social science evidence is invoked when courts create new law (e.g., law regarding the segregation of public schools by race or by gender). Finally, social science evidence is used to provide an empirically valid estimate of a legally relevant outcome (e.g., the likelihood that a person charged with one crime will commit another crime if released on bail). Each of these three outcomes will be described in Professor Monahan’s remarks.
About the Speaker
John Monahan, a psychologist, teaches and writes about how courts use behavioral science evidence, violence risk assessment, criminology and mental health law. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the National Research Council. Monahan was the founding president of the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychology and Law and has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He also has been a visiting fellow at several law schools — including Harvard, Stanford, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley — as well as at the American Academy in Rome, and at All Souls College, Oxford. He twice directed research networks for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 1997, he received an honorary law degree from the City University of New York.
Monahan is the author or editor of 17 books and more than 300 articles and chapters. His work has been cited more than 30,000 times. One of his books, Social Science in Law, co-authored with Laurens Walker, is now in its 10th edition and has been translated into Chinese. Two of his other books won the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding research in law and psychiatry. Monahan’s work has been cited frequently by courts, including the California Supreme Court in the landmark case of Tarasoff v. Regents, and the U.S. Supreme Court in Barefoot v. Estelle, in which he was referred to as “the leading thinker on the issue” of violence risk assessment.