We argue that Alasdair MacIntyre's description of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as an exemplar of practical reasoning, who envisions the contextual and consensual balancing of different goods according to the further good of the American social order, enables a reinterpretation of O'Connor's majority opinion in "Grutter v. Bollinger," the…

The function of the judiciary is to protect the law system and the law rights and centers by a request applied to it by the concerned persons, and by issuing decisions and verdicts that remove the state of ignoring which surrounds the right or the law center wanted to be protected in which it gets the binding force of the thing judged owing to its…

Detecting and punishing violations of research integrity requires first having to prove them. However, establishing proof of research misconduct presents a number of challenges. Firstly, it has to be conducted in a variety of contexts, including before research integrity officers, university disciplinary committees, civil courts, criminal courts,…

The work of Urie Bronfenbrenner is a key framework in Family Science, yet there are many areas where it has seldom been applied, including in the processes experienced by divorcing families in Family Court. Acknowledging the paucity of scholarship applying ecological systems theory to these topics, the paper offers instructive interpretations of…

In 1954, the Supreme Court delivered the landmark decision of "Brown v. Board of Education"--establishing the right to attend a desegregated school as a national constitutional right--but the decision contained fundamental ambiguities. The Supreme Court has never offered a clear definition of what desegregation means or laid out a…

Past research has shown that counterfactual ("If…then…") thoughts influence causal and responsibility attribution in the judicial context. However, little is known on whether and how the use of counterfactuals in communication affects lay jurors' and judges' evaluations. In two studies, we asked mock lay jurors (Study 1) and actual…

Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages.…

This paper, taking linguistic theory of adaptation as its theoretical foundation, examines how courtroom questioning on the part of the judge is adapted to various contextual factors in legal setting. To account for the judge's adaptation to the legal procedures in courtroom questioning, three types of questions are found as specific choices at…

Monetary sanctions, also known as legal financial obligations (LFOs), are a highly consequential yet underexplored element of the criminal legal system. LFOs consist of fines, fees, costs, restitution, surcharges, and other financial penalties that are imposed on individuals when they encounter the criminal legal system. Drawing on data from a…

The courts' role in educational disputes is much researched, but while the legal and socio-political implications of judicial decisions are often scrutinised, judges' pedagogical assumptions have generally been overlooked. This paper focuses on educational competency by considering judges' understandings of the pedagogical effect of religious…

In the Bible, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are said to usher in the end of the world. That is why, in 1964, Judge Ben Cameron gave four of his fellow judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit the derisive nickname "the Fifth Circuit Four"--because they were ending the segregationist world of the Deep…

Nowadays, more and more people report about their memories in cross-cultural contexts. In international criminal settings and asylum procedures, object recognition tests can provide valuable information, for example, about weapons used during a crime or landmarks from the claimed region of origin. This study was the first to compare object…

This critical discourse analysis examines the construction of an "appropriate" education by Florida administrative law judges in their special education final orders over time. The results indicate that despite each child being different, the construction of an appropriate education was uniform within the given time periods. Prior to the…

The purpose of this study is to explore how a Florida administrative law judge (ALJ) adjudicated the giftedness of one student who was found ineligible to be enrolled in a gifted education program. Specifically, we explore the discourse in an ALJ's final order to uncover how an ALJ navigates through conflict and deconstructs the conflicting expert…

Background/Context: Pickering v. Board of Education, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, is considered the high-water mark in the constitutional protection of public employee free speech. Two significant decisions issued by that Court since Pickering have limited public employees' expressive rights: Connick v. Myers and Garcetti v.…