Since its creation in 1999, the Center has held several interdisciplinary conferences and symposia, bringing leading scholars and specialists from around the world to Brooklyn Law School.
Symposium:
Statutory Interpretation: How Much Work Does Language Do?
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition and the Brooklyn Law Review
With 2010 marking Justice Scalia’s 25th year on the Supreme Court, his approach to statutory interpretation has had great influence on both the courts and the academic community. Yet vigorous disagreement continues in both realms. In a series of roundtables, leading scholars discussed and debated their views on such issues as whether uncertainty in statutory language is a necessity, whether legislatures can solve some of their own problems by legislating in a manner designed to help statutory interpreters in advance, and which institutions can best construe statutes in different contexts.
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Symposium:
Is Morality Universal and Should the Law Care?
Co-sponsored by the Brooklyn Law Review
Discoveries about the ways our minds work lead us to ask important questions that concern the law. Among them are: Do we have a universal set of moral principles, which suggests that people should be held responsible for complying with them regardless of articulated legal standards? Is there a universal set of justifications and excuses for otherwise bad conduct? Do we have a strong impulse toward retribution, and if so, should the law reinforce or temper that impulse? Are there universal principles of social cognition, and if so, how should the law respond to their existence? Can we tie any such patterns to evolution? Are we configured to blame more easily than to praise, and how does the law reflect this asymmetry?
Participants in the symposium included experts in law, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, history, and psychiatry. Their presence at the symposium highlighted both the occasional consensus and more frequent controversy about these most important questions.
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Talk:
Liability for Risk: Citizens' Perspectives on Liability for Loss of Chance
When two people perform similarly bad acts, but only one of them causes injury, the system often treats the lucky perpetrator far better than the one whose conduct resulted in actual harm. This problem is referred to as loss of chance in the tort literature, and as moral luck in the philosophical literature. Studies show that people care a great deal about a perpetrator’s state of mind when damages are awarded or sanctions meted out, regardless of whether actual injury has occurred; that there is a moral luck component to people’s judgments; and that they appear to distinguish, at least to some extent, the differing purposes of tort law (corrective justice) and criminal law (retributive justice).
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Lecture:
Courtroom Discourse in China and the United States: A Comparative Analysis
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of International Business Law; and, the Asian-American Law Students Association (AALSA)
Dr. Meizhen Liao presented a detailed comparison between Chinese and American criminal court judgments, highlighting the differences between the legal systems and the larger cultures. A professor of linguistics and director of the institute of linguistics in Central China Normal University in Wuhan, Dr. Liao also heads a Ph.D. program in language and law at China University of Political Sciences and Law in Beijing.
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Symposium:
A Cross-Disciplinary Look at Scientific Truth: What’s the Law to Do?
Science and the legal system have been facing off for some time, with no end in sight. For example, every time a consumer sues a pharmaceutical company or a manufacturer for injuries, a complex mixture of scientific and legal constructs and values comes into play. How do you know that this product really caused this particular injury? What constitutes proof? How much information should we require before we can say that our best theory is good enough? Who should decide? What inferences should be drawn from a lack of information?
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