PROFESSOR JULIA SIMON-KERR WRITES ABOUT SYSTEMIC LYING IN OUR LEGAL SYSTEM!

"February 10, 2014

 Hartford, CT:

 Julia Simon-Kerr joined the [CT] Law School faculty in of 2012 as an associate professor of law and the Ralph and Doris Hansmann Scholar after spending two years as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Her scholarship focuses on evidence, particularly on how lying and credibility in the legal system interact with evolving cultural norms.

Professor Simon-Kerr’s work-in-progress, "Systemic Lying," explores a particular form of cooperative lying that occurs throughout the history of our legal system and in many different areas of the law. Systemic lying involves the cooperation of multiple actors applying a particular principle that guides their deception across cases. Surprisingly, given the system’s clear prohibition on lying in the courtroom, it becomes an open secret and functions as a controlling mechanism within the legal system.

"Through case studies of several instances where this phenomenon occurs across legal areas and over time," explains Professor Simon-Kerr, "I develop a theory of systemic lying.” Professor Simon-Kerr's theory suggests that systemic lying is a product of severe disjunction between cultural beliefs about justice and legal prescriptions. Rather than allow the law to take its course and deliver what would be perceived as unjust outcomes, participants lie and preserve the facade of a system that delivers results consonant with popular moral intuition. The collective and open nature of systemic lying and the fact that it occurs for a justice-related rationale allows it to escape the usual stigma attached to lying, particularly lying embedded within a system that privileges truth in the courtroom. "Ultimately, systemic lying is a persistent and powerful phenomenon within the system because it achieves a legitimacy that individual lies or covert group deception tend to lack," says Professor Simon-Kerr.

Professor Simon-Kerr also has written on education law, gender and the law, and law and literature, an area of interest she examines in a recent book chapter, published by Oxford University Press, entitled, “Pious Perjury in Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian.”

FOR THE LINK TO THIS INFORMATION, SEE BELOW:

http://www.law.uconn.edu/about/press-room/professor-julia-simon-kerr-explores-theory-systemic-lying

AND FOR ANOTHER ARTICLE ON THIS, SEE BELOW:

According to Megan Spicer of "The Connecticut Law
Tribune"

August 10, 2015

"The oath that Connecticut lawyers take in order to be admitted to the bar is 122 words long. Much of it consists of promising to never do anything dishonest and to inform the court if they see others being dishonest. It ends: "So help you God or upon penalty of perjury."

But those words only go so far, according to a University of Connecticut School of Law professor who says that dishonesty is rampant inside and outside the courtrooms, in jury deliberation rooms and even in the judge's chambers. The phenomenon is known as "systemic lying" and Julie Simon-Kerr recently published a paper on it in the William & Mary Law Review arguing that the practice poses a threat to the legal system.

"Systemic lying isn't benign," said Simon-Kerr, who teaches courses on civil procedure and evidence at UConn. "It threatens the fabric and legitimacy of the legal system to have all these actors conspire in the courtroom." She went on to call it "sinister"..."

Read more: 

http://www.ctlawtribune.com/id=1202734373407/UConn-Professors-Research-Details-Legacy-of-Lying-in-The-Legal-System#ixzz3iXgWEKB5