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We reviewed U.S. federal and state sexual harassment court cases involving a prior workplace romance between the plaintiff and alleged harasser. Results of our content analysis show that, unlike employees’ decisions, judges’ decisions can be predicted from legal but not ethically salient extralegal case features. Hence, when compared to prior research, our study reveals the following discrepancy: judges follow a traditional legal model, whereas employees follow an ethical model when making decisions about romance‐harassment cases. Our study also reveals that the mere presence (versus absence) of a prior romance reduces the likelihood of a plaintiff’s success in a harassment case. We discuss implications for management practice and research from the perspective of legal and ethical decision making.

This chapter harnesses Western conceptions of justice, traditional justifications of social control, and existing social inequalities to frame and fully understand the racial and ethnic disparities which constitute the U.S. juvenile justice system.

Juvenile justice system disparities are framed within the theoretical contexts of Western conceptions of justice, traditional justifications of social control, and social inequality. The chapter’s perspective is based on these concepts of justice, social control justifications, and evidence from scholarly research on juvenile justice system disparities.

Overall, the U.S. juvenile justice system’s racial and ethnic disparities violate fundamental concepts of justice, traditional justifications of social control, and exacerbate existing social inequalities.

Through its utilization of Western conceptions of justice and social control justifications, this chapter offers a relatively unique framework for the examination of the U.S. juvenile justice system’s racial and ethnic disparities. While recognizing the overall quality and significance of disparities research, the chapter asks the reader to take a step back, and look at and think about the broader justice and inequality contexts.

The study aims to examine the effect of detective experience on the likelihood of clearing a homicide, while controlling for additional extralegal and case/investigative characteristics.

This study uses homicide and policing data collected from case files in a mid-sized US city. Detective experience is measured in multiple ways. Analytical models include extralegal variables, case characteristics, and proxies of investigative quality as controls. The study uses logistic regression with a dichotomous clearance outcome.

The results suggest a robust and significant inverse relationship between the years spent as a homicide detective and the likelihood of case closure. However, years of experience with the department overall has a significant and positive relationship to clearance. Investigation-related variables and case characteristics contribute more to model explanatory power than extralegal factors.

The potential role of experience has not been fully explored, with contradictory findings over time. This work builds on previous research to highlight the potential role of experience in clearing cases, while questioning previous assumptions tied to the belief that more experience improves investigative outcomes.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate how judges and the general population formulate judgments on legal cases, considering both legal and extralegal factors, with a focus on the significance of the defendant’s sex.

The first experiment aimed to determine if non-lawyers’ judgments are affected by the defendant’s sex, using brief excerpts from indictments with the defendant’s sex interchanged. Study 2 aimed to verify if this effect applies to future lawyers, suggesting a peculiar approval granted by men to women displaying illegal sexual behaviour towards young men.

The findings showed that the sex of the offender only influenced judgments in sexual offences, with male participants being more lenient towards female offenders.

The originality/value of the paper lies in its examination of the influence of the defendant’s sex on judgments made by both judges and the general population, specifically focussing on non-lawyers’ judgments. While previous studies have shown that judges tend to be more lenient towards women in certain cases, this paper adds novelty by investigating whether a similar effect is observed among non-lawyers. Moreover, the research sheds light on the relevance of the defendant's sex in cases of sexual offences and identifies a gender-specific leniency towards female offenders, particularly among male participants. The study also explores how this effect might extend to future lawyers, providing insights into societal attitudes regarding illegal sexual behaviour involving women and young men. Overall, the paper contributes valuable information to the understanding of how sex-based biases can influence legal judgments and decision-making processes.

This chapter presents four theories that hypothesize race/ethnicity disparities in sentence outcomes. Empirical studies assessing the relationship between defendant’s race/ethnicity and sentence severity are discussed.

I focus on federal sentencing in terms of support or non-support of the theoretical perspectives.

Sentence disparity linked to defendant’s race/ethnicity are observed as net main effects, as a component in joint-conditioning effects with other extralegal defendant characteristics, and as a variable that conditions the effect of process-related mechanism of discretion, and legally relevant case characteristics, and as indirect effects.

Theories share substantial conceptual overlap in specifying the relationship between defendant’s race/ethnicity and predictions of the effect of defendant’s race/ethnicity on sentence severity.

To provide an empirical analysis of what influences police use of field citations (tickets) against citizens in nontraffic and traffic encounters.

The research was conducted using systematic social observations of police‐citizen encounters in Cincinnati, Ohio, from April 1997 to 1998. Multiple logistic regression models were used to examine the effects of legal and extralegal factors on the dependant variable (receipt of a citation) versus an officer doing nothing or arresting a citizen in nontraffic and traffic encounters.

Officers appear to be more likely to issue citations, as opposed to doing nothing formal or making an arrest, in traffic encounters. The extant literature's focus on citation issuance being more relevant to police behavior in traffic encounters as opposed to other routine encounters may be appropriate. When the decision rests between issuing a citation or making a full‐custody arrest in traffic encounters, white officers are more likely to arrest than their black counterparts, and black suspects were significantly more likely than Caucasians to be arrested than cited. Race of the officer or the suspect exhibited no significant effect in any of the other models estimated.

The study utilized data collected on police‐citizen interactions from one police agency in one jurisdiction, and the data do not come from a study designed primarily to examine citation outcomes or traffic encounters.

This study would be useful to researchers examining police use of citations, officer behavior in traffic and nontraffic encounters, quantifying law in police‐citizen encounters, and race‐based policing.

This study provides a comprehensive review of the literature, and an empirical analysis, regarding officer decision making as it pertains to the issuing of tickets relative to other police actions (i.e. arrest) in traffic and nontraffic situations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between moral disengagement, individual differences (i.e. need for cognition (NFC), faith in intuition, legal authoritarianism) and responses to vigilantism.

US university students were surveyed.

NFC reduced support for vigilante justice while legal authoritarianism increased support for vigilante justice. Both relationships are mediated by moral disengagement, which also increases support for vigilante justice.

The present study provides a starting point for further research on individual differences and responses to vigilantism.

Results expand on the understanding of the function of individual differences in a morally charged decision-making task. Content has implications for academics and legal practitioners.

Vigilante justice is embedded within American culture. However, vigilantism is currently illegal, and recent instances of what might be considered vigilante justice (e.g. George Zimmerman, David Barajas) have highlighted the controversy surrounding such extralegal violence. Little research has focussed on the moral quandary posed by vigilantism.

Framed by the intersectionality perspective and results from prior research, we examined the effects of race/ethnicity, gender, probation violations, and type of violation on juvenile justice case outcomes in a Mid-Atlantic state.

Bivariate and multivariate analyses in the form of logistic regression were used to assess the extent race and ethnicity, gender, probation violations, and the type of violation, individually and in combination, impact case outcomes.

The findings indicate that the race/ethnicity of the youth, his or her gender, and whether involved in a probation violation and to some degree the type of violation, individually and in some cases, jointly, effect juvenile justice decision making. These relationships often involve receiving both harsh and lenient outcomes. We interpret the results as evidence that stereotyping plays out differently when race/ethnicity and gender intersect.

The study contributes to the general literature by (1) examining the neglected combination effects of race/ethnicity and gender with increased social control within juvenile justice proceedings; (2) including Hispanic youth; and (3) looking at the interrelationships among race/ethnicity and gender with the treatment of probation violators.