The College of Law was well-represented at the recent St. Louis University Colloquium on Law, Behavioral Science, and Social Science. Professor Jennifer Robbennolt presented a work-in-progress called “’The Rule of Law’ Silo” that is co-authored by Professors Verity Winship and Colleen Murphy. The paper presents the results of a survey to understand what people understand the phrase “the rule of law” to mean.

Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

Professor Jennifer Robbennolt was a featured presenter at the 31st Annual Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy at DePaul. The symposium focused on the influence of key social science insights on civil justice, including key questions raised by social science scholarship, such as the work of the late Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies has selected “Settlementality,” an article co-authored by Professors Jennifer Robbennolt, Verity Winship, and alumna Jessica Bregant, for publication. Slated to be published later this year, the article is meanwhile available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4773926.

Professor Jennifer Robbennolt will speak at the Texas A&M Annual Dispute Resolution Symposium in March. The symposium will explore the roles pudges play in court-connected “alternative” dispute resolution, including referring or ordering cases to these processes and enforcing negotiated/mediated settlement agreements and arbitration awards and overseeing the incorporation and quality of dispute resolution in the courts. The symposium will feature several prominent judges and other law professors.

Data from the SPOTLITE project, of which Professor Jennifer Robbennolt is a co-principal investigator, was featured in an in-depth report about efforts to create more transparency in Illinois around police-involved killings. Illinois law requires departments to release a report on police-involved killings if no charges are filed, but the patchwork system of reporting leaves many gaps in the record. Illinois Public Media’s reporting helps fill in gaps thanks to data collected by Robbennolt and her fellow researchers.

Professor Jennifer Robbennolt has been elected as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, effective January 1, 2025. Fellow status is awarded to those who have demonstrated outstanding contributions in the field of psychology, enhancing the field by their diligent work and commitment. In addition, Fellows are those whose work has had a national impact on the field of psychology beyond a local, state or regional level. On behalf of everyone at the College of Law, we congratulate Professor Robbennolt for this distinguished honor.

Professors Bob Lawless and Jennifer Robbennolt co-authored a blog post for Psychology Today, titled “Purdue Pharma, Bankruptcy, and Procedural Justice.” In the post, they discuss how the Sackler family sought a release in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case that would protect them from facing opioid lawsuits, despite not having declared bankruptcy themselves. Many claimants were opposed to a settlement plan and wanted to face the Sacklers in court. The authors argue that psychologists should explore concerns for procedural justice when tort cases are resolved through bankruptcy.

People generally grasp the basic concept of settlement, recognizing it as an agreement between parties to resolve a dispute without the need for a trial, but some confusion exists regarding the settlement process. Professors Jennifer Robbennolt and Verity Winship, along with Jessica Bregant ’09, have made examining settlements one of the hallmarks of their scholarship, and their work was highlighted in The Civilian, an online journal out of Stanford that makes research accessible to lay audiences. The Robbennolt-Winship study surveyed more than 1,000 individuals to learn more about people’s perceptions of fault and responsibility in settled cases, revealing that about half of the respondents believe settlement implies some admission of responsibility, emphasizing the impact of public perception on individuals’ confidence in the legal system.

At the 2nd annual conference of the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies, Professor Jennifer Robbennolt delivered the opening keynote lecture. Held in Warsaw, Poland, the conference brought together an international audience of empirical legal scholars to share research on the assumptions, the functioning and the impact of the law. Robbennolt was the third to speak at the conference, providing a keynote speech after opening remarks from the hosts. Her speech, “Apologies, Remorse, and Amends: Empirical Legal Studies Across Domains and Disciplines,” addressed the role of apologies in remedying harm and the research she has done in this area.