Irrationality in Law and Life: Heuristics and Biases in Legal Decision Making

This talk addresses new discoveries in the science of subconscious decision making and how they are changing our conception of legal advocacy, persuasion and judicial decision making. Do judges really round murderers’ sentences to the nearest even-numbered year? Do parole decisions turn on the timing of judges’ meals? Are taller people really considered to be more truthful in court? The answers to these questions involve unconscious, “fast and frugal” decision processes known as “heuristics,” and their implications for the rule of law might make us all uneasy.

Craig Jones QC is a Professor of Law at Thompson Rivers University, where his teaching focuses on advocacy and litigation. He holds an LLB from UBC and a Master’s from Harvard Law School. He has worked extensively as a litigator in private practice and for the Attorney General of British Columbia, and has been involved in a number of noted constitutional cases including the Polygamy Reference and the Insite safe-injection site litigation. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2011, one of the youngest lawyers in BC history to be so honoured. Craig was a Resident Member of Green College during his law school days at UBC, and he and his wife Amanda were married at Graham House in 1999. They now live in Kamloops with their two children, a horse, goats, chickens, rabbits, ducks, three dogs and a parrot.