Sunday, August 10, 2014

"Scientizing Culpability: The Implications of Hall v. Florida and the Possibility of a 'Scientific Stare Decisis'" [feedly]



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"Scientizing Culpability: The Implications of Hall v. Florida and the Possibility of a 'Scientific Stare Decisis'"
// Sentencing Law and Policy

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper available on SSRN authored by Christopher Slobogin. Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court's decision in Hall v. Florida holds that "clinical definitions" control the meaning of intellectual disability in the death penalty context. In other words, the Court "scientized" the definition of intellectual disability. This article discusses the implications of this unprecedented move. It also introduces the idea of scientific stare decisis — a requirement that groups that are scientifically alike be treated similarly for culpability purposes — as a means of implementing the scientization process.


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