“Of Atkins and Men: Deviations from Clinical Definitions of Mental Retardation in Death Penalty Cases”
Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy., 2009 Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09-001
By John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, and Christopher Seeds
Under Atkins v. Virginia., the Eighth Amendment exempts from execution individuals who meet the clinical definitions of mental retardation set forth by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and the American Psychiatric Association. Some states apply exclusion criteria that deviate from and are more restrictive than the accepted scientific and clinical definitions of mental retardation. Left unaddressed, the state deviations discussed herein permit what Atkins does not: the death-sentencing and execution of some capital defendants who have mental retardation.

“A Jury of One: Opinion Formation, Conformity, and Dissent on Juries”
Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-030
By Valerie Hans with Nicole L. Waters
The authors examine the role of the dissenter jury member, using felony data of nearly 3,500 jurors. Jurors were asked, “If it were entirely up to you as a one-person jury, what would your verdict have been in this case?” Over one-third of jurors privately would have voted against their jury's decision. These data identify jurors who dissent and distinguish dissenters who hang the jury and dissenters who acquiesce. Jurors' role expectations, evidentiary views, sense of fairness, and deliberation procedures affected the likelihood for dissent.

“Justice in Time”
George Washington Law Review, Vol. 77,
2009 Cornell Law School Research Paper No. 09-002
By Robert C. Hockett
This essay aims to dispel the sense of confusion that afflicts intertemporal justice assessment. It demonstrates that the most vexing puzzles raised by questions of intergenerational justice afflict justice theories that were not coherent to begin with. It argues, the correct approach to justice is no more challenged by transtemporal puzzles than is any other exercise in future planning. It shows that "intertemporal," "transtemporal," or "diachronic" justice can be helpfully divided into two classes: "epistemic" and "analytic." The author next shows that all of the notorious intertemporal impossibility results from Koopmans' on down afflict only the erroneous justice conceptions just mentioned. The paper concludes by showing that the correct, analytically coherent take on justice faces little more challenge from the diachronic than from the synchronic case.

“Pareto versus Welfare”
Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-031
By Robert C. Hockett
This article shows that no strictly welfarist social welfare function can give complete expression to a normative social evaluation, as distinguished from simply describing a social allocation. The author also shows that social welfare functions, employed to formulate complete social evaluations, must be constructed without regard to weak, strong or indifferentist Pareto. The results derived here generalize Arrow’s (1951), Sen’s (1970), and cognate impossibility results.