| Abstract: | Justice Holmes (Northern Securities Company v. United States, 1904, p. 197) noted that "great cases, like hard cases, make bad law." In a within-subject design, college participants rated the strength of the plaintiffs and defendant's claims, rendered a verdict, and gave their determinative reasons for their decision in each of 45 "hard cases." They subsequently made two modifications to the original vignette, such that their initial verdict would swing the other way or swing further in their initial direction, and gave their cutting-edge reasons for their verdict shifts. Although the cases were judged to be hard overall, variance was evident, including variance with Supreme Court decisions in some of the same cases. In the participants' analyses, rights and duties, qualified by factors relating to the legitimacy of their reach and their underlying motives, were central, but these were understood in a moral rather than legal way. In their moral analysis, perceptions of unfairness triggered a search for a fair solution, as the process revealed instrumental, constitutive, and ethical dimensions to fairness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
