First-year Law Students Research Articles

Punitiveness, Recall, and the Police

Three groups of subjects of different social and educational backgrounds—first-year law students, police trainees in the first weeks of their course, and persons (mostly on relief) attending a settlement house—were pretested for punitiveness in a study of recall. The police trainees were found to be more rigid and far more punitive than the other groups. Within each group the mean recall for those subjects scoring above their group median for punitiveness was significantly better than the recall of those below their group median. Possible reasons for this result are discussed. Comparisons are made among control groups, groups subject to status-influence, those who were told they would be witnesses for the prosecution, those told they would be witnesses for the defense, and those told that the principal character had been in a mental institution. The recall scores of these subjects are discussed in relation to punitiveness and recall.

Ethical problems in human experimentation.

I HAVE asked myself what a mere lawyer can contribute to a discussion of the ethics of medical experimentation. I feel like the hapless first-year law student in Professor "Bull" Warren's class to whom, as he was floundering, the Bull said, "You are in very shallow water, but you are sinking fast!"If you expect an exposition of rules of law regarding medical experiments, I am afraid you will be sorely disappointed, for this is not an area where the law has crystallized into firm, neat rules. To look for such rules would be to emulate the figures of the . . .