Abstract
Some of the most pressing issues in American criminal law—the dominance of plea bargaining, vast executive discretion, and systemic racial disparities—turn on fundamentally empirical questions. Yet, while legal academics largely analyze these issues through doctrinal or theoretical lenses, psychologists and criminologists frequently study the exact same phenomena using empirical methods. Surprisingly, these fields operate almost entirely independently. The legal academy consistently overlooks substantial psychological research that could inform normative arguments, while psychologists often design studies without crucial context from criminal legal scholarship. This chapter outlines the contours of this critical information gap and proposes solutions to bridge it.
Repository Citation
John B. Meixner Jr.,
Bridging the Information Gap Between Criminal Law and Psychological Science
(2025),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1838
Book chapter in Law & Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Compendium (forthcoming). Previously posted on SSRN.