Last modified: Thursday, October 2, 2008
IU Law, Psychology faculty members win prestigious Emerald Management Reviews Citation of Excellence Award
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 2, 2008
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Two Indiana University professors have won the Emerald Management Reviews Citation of Excellence, a prestigious award recognizing the 50 best articles published in business and management journals around the world.
Joseph L. Hoffmann, Harry Pratter Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law--Bloomington, and Steven J. Sherman, Chancellor's Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington, are the co-authors of "The Psychology and Law of Voluntary Manslaughter: What Can Psychology Research Teach Us About the 'Heat of Passion' Defense?"
In the article, published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (Vol. 20, Issue 5), Hoffmann and Sherman question criminal law's assumptions about the role of emotion in voluntary manslaughter cases. While psychology research shows that anger can last for a long time and even build through repeated reminders of a provoking event, the doctrine of voluntary manslaughter assumes a rapid "cooling off" period. In addition, the law tends not to allow other emotions, such as fear, to mitigate criminal punishment, even though psychology finds the effects of anger and fear on human decision-making to be similar. The article concludes that the law should do a better job of incorporating the insights of psychology, even as it pursues independent normative goals such as setting behavioral aspirations that most people may not be able to satisfy.
Emerald Management Reviews is an abstracting and indexing database that covers every article in the top 400 business and management journals worldwide, including titles such as the Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Finance, and the MIT Sloan Management Review.
Articles that appear in those journals are sent by reviewers to independent subject experts for evaluation. After more than 15,000 entries were examined for 2007, the article by Hoffmann and Sherman was selected as one of the top 50.
