This paper summarizes key shifts in judicial decisions relating to public health powers during the pandemic and the implications of those decisions for public health practice. Then, it gives a preview and call for partnership in developing a legal framework for authority that guides public health to better activities, processes, and accountability in service of the public\'s health.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, problem-solving courts adopted virtual hearings. We conducted an online nationwide survey with a convenience sample of court staff to elicit their perceptions of court participants\' attendance, engagement, willingness to talk, and ability to form connection with judges during in-person versus virtual hearings. Sign tests compared ordinal ratings for perceptions of court participant outcomes during in-person versus virtual hearing modalities, and for audiovisual technology versus audio-only technology. The final analysis included 146 staff. Staff felt that during in-person hearings judges could form closer relationships with participants, quality of information exchanged was higher, and participants were more willing to talk. Staff rated attendance as high regardless of the modality. Staff felt participant engagement was higher with audiovisual technology than audio-only technology. Our results suggest that staff have concerns about effects of virtual hearings on court participant engagement and ability to form relationships with judges. Courts should address these potential negative effects of virtual hearings. We are concerned that staff perceived participants more negatively when participants used audio-only versus audiovisual technology, because technology access could be associated with participant demographic characteristics. Further research is needed to examine court participant perceptions and outcomes.

State laws that require minors seeking abortion care to notify or obtain consent from a parent or other legal guardian are broadly referred to as parental involvement laws. Judicial bypass allows a minor to petition the court to bypass parental involvement. Even before the Dobbs v Jackson Women\'s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June 2022, 36 states had at least one parental involvement law, making minor access to abortion care even more complex than adult access. Since the Dobbs decision, at least 15 states have completely banned abortion, adding further complexity, geographic barriers, and inequities to the pursuit of reproductive healthcare. In this narrative review and commentary, we explain parental involvement laws and judicial bypass from both a legal and medical perspective, exploring the evolving challenges created by this system in the year post-Dobbs.

Previous research focused on popular US Supreme Court rulings expanding rights; however, less is known about rulings running against prevailing public opinion and restricting rights. We examine the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women\'s Health Organization opinion, which overturned Roe v. Wade\'s (1973) constitutional protection of abortion rights. A three-wave survey panel (5,489 interviews) conducted before the leak of the drafted Dobbs opinion, after the leak, and after the official opinion release, and cross-sectional data from these three time points (10,107 interviews) show that the ruling directly influenced views about the constitutional legality of abortion and fetal viability. However, personal opinions were not directly influenced and perceived social norms shifted away from the ruling, meaning that individuals perceived greater public support for abortion. We argue that extensive coverage of opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade supported this shift. Dobbs v. Jackson Women\'s Health Organization also caused large changes, polarized by party identification, in opinions about the Supreme Court.

This paper is an exploration of the state of \'clinical unease\' experienced by clinicians in contexts where professional judgement-grounded in clinical knowledge, critical reflection and a sound grasp of the law-indicates that there is more than one ethically defensible way to proceed. The question posed is whether the courts can be viewed as an appropriate vehicle to settle clinical unease by providing a ruling that clarifies the legal and ethical issues arising in the case, even in situations where there is no dispute between the patient (or her proxies) and the healthcare team.The concept of \'clinical unease\' is framed with reference to the broader experience of clinical decision-making, and distinguished from other widely discussed phenomena in the healthcare literature like moral distress and conscientious objection. A number of reported cases are briefly examined where the courts were invited to rule in circumstances of apparent \'unease\'. The respective responsibilities of clinicians and courts are discussed: in particular, their capability and readiness to respond to matters of ethical concern.Four imagined clinical scenarios are outlined where a clinical team might welcome a court adjudication, under current rules. Consideration is given to the likelihood of such cases being heard, and to whether there may be better remedies than the courts. There are final reflections on what clinicians may actually wish for in seeking court involvement, and on whether a willingness to engage with the experience of clinical unease may lead to greater sensitivity towards the value perspectives of others.

We explored whether an educational forensic science informational (FSI) video either alone or with specialized jury instructions would assist mock jurors in evaluating forensic expert testimony.
We predicted that the FSI video would help participants distinguish between low-quality and high-quality testimony, evidenced by lower ratings of the testimony and the expert when the testimonial quality was low compared with when it was high.
Jury-eligible adults (N = 641; Mage = 38.18 years; 77.4% White; 8.1% Latino/a or Hispanic; 50.1% male) watched a mock trial and were randomly assigned to a no-forensic-evidence control condition or to a test condition (i.e., participants either watched the FSI video before the trial or did not and either received specialized posttrial instructions or did not). In the test conditions, a forensic expert provided low-quality or high-quality testimony about a latent impression, and participants rated the expert, their testimony, and the forensic evidence. All participants rendered verdicts.
The presence of the FSI video interacted with testimonial quality on ratings of the expert and forensic testimony: In the video-present condition, participants rated the expert in the low-quality testimony condition lower than did participants in the high-quality testimony condition (between-condition differences for credibility: d = -0.52, 95% confidence interval [CI] [-0.78, -0.27]; trustworthiness: d = -0.67, 95% CI [-0.92, -0.42]; knowledgeability: d = -0.54, 95% CI [-0.80, -0.29]). The pattern was the same for the expert\'s testimony (between-condition differences for convincingness: d = -0.41, 95% CI [-0.66, -0.16]; validity: d = -0.60, 95% CI [-0.86, -0.35]; presentation quality: d = -0.51, 95% CI [-0.76, -0.25]). Participants\' ratings in the video-absent condition did not differ on the basis of testimonial quality (ds = -0.07-0.11). The ratings of the print evidence and verdicts were unaffected. Specialized jury instructions had no effect.
The FSI video may be a practical in-court intervention to increase jurors\' sensitivity to low-quality forensic testimony without creating skepticism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Using the context of an intimate partner homicide trial, the study explored the effects of defendant gender and age on mock-jurors\' verdicts, sentences, and culpability ratings-and whether defendant credibility and juror anger mediate these effects. The study used a 2 (Defendant Gender: male vs. female) × 3 (Defendant Age: 25, 45, or 65 years) between-subjects design. Participants (N = 513 community members) completed the experiment online. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the six Defendant Gender × Age Conditions. Participants read the trial transcripts that included the age and gender manipulations, provided verdicts and sentences, and completed the following measures: culpability, anger, credibility, and manipulation checks. Consistent with our hypotheses mock-jurors were more likely to find the male defendant guilty and give him longer sentences than the female defendant. Additionally, when the defendant was male (vs. female) mock-jurors provided higher anger ratings and rated the defendant as more culpable in the victim\'s death. Also consistent with our hypotheses, mock-jurors were more likely to find the youngest defendant guilty and view him as more culpable and less credible than the oldest defendant. The mechanisms responsible for jurors\' biased decisions varied as a function of the extra-legal variable (defendant gender vs. age). The defendant age effect was mediated by defendant credibility and the gender effect by juror anger. A defendant\'s right to a fair trial is dependent on a court\'s ability to limit extra-legal variables from influencing jurors\' decisions. Understanding the mechanism responsible for such bias is required before the courts can effectively remedy bias.

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This paper proposes that US human rights experts and abortion rights advocates challenge the striking down of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by the majority of US Supreme Court justices because of the multiple human rights violations it has engendered. The paper has three parts. The first part summarizes the compelling response of the three dissenting Supreme Court justices to the majority ruling, which spells out those violations in detail. The second part offers a history of cases of violations of human rights related to abortion in other countries that have been heard and adjudicated by a range of human rights bodies in the last 20 years, and their outcomes. It shows that working on these cases has created working relationships between national and international human rights experts and advocates. Based on this information, the third part proposes that US human rights and abortion rights advocates take a case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the US Supreme Court ruling, asking the commission to direct the US government to void the majority ruling on Roe v. Wade-on the grounds that it violates the human rights of anyone who seeks an abortion and potentially also of those whose wanted pregnancies become a risk to their health and life and need to be terminated. And if the United States does not agree, the commission should refer the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Despite the pervasiveness of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Canada, research examining IPV in the context of Asian Canadians is scarce. Our study examined whether and how Canadian judges consider culture when determining a sentence in IPV cases involving an Asian offender and/or an Asian victim. We systematically searched for publicly published cases through CanLII. A total of 50 cases met the inclusion criteria. Cultural themes were identified using a direct content analysis approach to capture a priori themes in the literature, as well as identify any other factors considered. Our findings indicated culture was most often considered in only a superficial way (n = 31, 62.0%), where judges only made statements that simply identified the ethnicity of the offender and not how culture may have impacted the case. When examining cases where culture was meaningfully considered there were no prominent culture themes identified (all themes present in <14% of cases). We suggest this may not only reflect the heterogeneity of Asian Canadians, but could also reflect the lack of cultural consideration by the judges. Cultural factors were also rarely considered explicitly as an aggravating or mitigating factor in a case (n = 2; 4.0% and n = 7; 14.0% of the total sample, respectively). The findings reveal the current lack of meaningful consideration of culture in IPV legal cases involving Asian Canadians. We outline how this contrasts the increased attention to the meaningful consideration of culture in the Canadian legal arena and prompt all professionals involved in assessing and managing IPV risk to consider racial, ethnic, and cultural factors in these cases.