U.S. Supreme Court justices and other federal judges are, effectively, appointed for life, with no built-in check on their cognitive functioning as they approach old age. There is about a century of research on aging and intelligence that shows the vulnerability of processing speed, fluid reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory to…

Laws and guidelines regulating legal decision making are often imposed without taking the cognitive processes of the legal decision maker into account. In the case of sentencing, this raises the question of whether the sentencing decisions of prosecutors and judges are consistent with legal policy. Especially in handling low-level crimes, legal…

Outlines the need to develop specific decision rules for the various judging paradigms in academic debate. Uses the policy-making metaphor as an example. (PD)

Because legal argument shares many of the characteristics of academic debate, it can serve as a paradigm for evaluating debates. Like debate, legal argument is bilateral, the judge is external to the deliberation and excluded from raising his or her own arguments, and reasons have been developed for assigning presumption, determining the wording…

College debaters who go to law school are often surprised by the differences between the processes that take place in the court of reason and the process that takes place in the court of law. The court of reason relies mainly on authoritative testimony, while the court of law relies on direct evidence. Evidence in the court of reason is either…