From the Back Cover
Handbook of Trial Consulting
Richard L. Wiener and Brian H. Bornstein, editors
Since its beginnings in scientific jury selection, trial consulting has engendered a growing academic literature, a professional association, and a thriving industry covering many discrete areas of practice. And while there is no specific course of study for trial consultants, much of what constitutes the field falls under the heading of legal psychology, with a number of available volumes on the subject. The Handbook of Trial Consulting differs from the others in its emphasis on social analytic jurisprudence, an empirically-based interdisciplinary lens for understanding legal issues and testing the assumptions that the law, and lawyers, make about human behavior, helping to ensure impartial, efficient service in diverse contexts while minimizing procedural and ethical pitfalls. Contributors focus on applied research methods, effective testimony strategies, specific psycholegal issues, and professional concerns to examine what trial consultants should know about:
- Jury selection and jury decision-making
- Social-cognitive aspects of legal persuasion
- The admissibility of expert witness testimony.
- Using survey research, statistics, and technological evidence
- Assessment of monetary and neuropsychological damages
- Avoiding conflicts of interest
Occupying a crucial intersection between disciplines (and even advising legal professionals about what they can expect from consultants), the Handbook of Trial Consulting is a field-defining resource for legal psychologists, andpsychiatrists, lawyers, criminologists, sociologists, and political scientists as well as graduate students and academicians in psychology and law.
Professor Wiener received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston and his Masters Degree in Legal Studies at UNL. He was professor of Psychology at Saint Louis University (1982- 2000) and most recently chair of the Department of Psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York. In 2002 Dr. Wiener joined the Law-Psychology Program (as director) and the Social Psychology Program at UNL. He is the former editor of Law and Human Behavior, the official journal of the American Psychology/Law Society (Division 41 of the APA). Dr. Wiener's research applies theories of social cognition to problems in legal decision-making. Among the topic areas he has investigated are perceptions of sexual harassment and jury decision making. Specifically, Dr. Wiener studies the role of generic prejudice in criminal cases and he studies how jurors reach capital murder decisions in assigning penalties. The National Science Foundation has funded and continues to fund this work. Currently, Dr. Wiener applies social cognitive theories of emotion, motivation, dual process of cognitive processing to explain how legal actors reach decisions relevant to law and policy. Other topics of investigation include the role of implicit attitude activation in generic prejudice, the role of emotions in jury judgments as they develop across the presentation of criminal cases, the role of mortality salience in death penalty judgments, and the role of counterfactual thinking in negligence judgments. Dr. Wiener teaches courses at UNL on behavioral sciences and the law and legal decision making.
