Edith Beerdsen

Happy to share that Developmental Evidence Rules is forthcoming in the California Law Review! What would it mean to take childhood seriously in evidence law? This article takes up that question.

Well, strike that - this issue seems to be fixed! Thank you, @ssrn.bsky.social.

I've been wondering if the Google Scholar issue has to do with the missing metadata on SSRN's end. SSRN no longer shows where a paper is published, so what is Google supposed to do with that? @ssrn.bsky.social, any update on whether/when it's going to be fixed?

Great photo! Stay warm.

Judicial meekness? Judicial apathy?

Working on Restoring Justice kept me grounded this past year, so I share it w/ excitement & some nervousness.

Written w/ Meredith Elizalde, whose son Nick was killed in a shooting at his high school, we argue for a right to restorative justice.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Thank you! This was such a diverse and multi-interested crowd. I really enjoyed your talk, too. What a great conference.

Screenshot of pearlmania's post, showing up in the "Quiet Posters" feed

I wonder if this was what the makers of Quiet Posters had in mind ;-)

First time presenting this work to a room of scientists. General reaction to learning about how science is evaluated for use in court: 🤯

This was a banger of a talk.

Everything is ready for the Perspectives on Scientific Error conference that starts tomorrow in Leiden! I look forward to hanging out with the mix of metascientists, philosophers of science, and statisticians! So many old friends will be there (and hopefully some new ones)! #PSE8

My latest article with the one and only @spenceroverton.bsky.social called “Digital Ethnonationalism” forthcoming in University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Here is the papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Wow, congratulations!!

Thrilled to share that 𝐺𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑡 𝑏𝑦 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑑 has found a home with the Yale Law Journal. This piece examines parental liability regimes and parental rights, and how they are connected by a shared logic that harms children and families. Thank you to all those who read drafts and offered feedback!

This paper came from a fascination with how lawyers try to game the system in litigation and how judges sometimes accept it and sometimes do not. This paper examines the concept of gamesmanship and how courts use it to shape litigants' strategic maneuvering room.

In civil litigation, strategy is everywhere. Some of it is explicitly envisioned by rules of procedure, but other forms of strategy rely more on clever exploitation of gaps in the rules, sometimes through trickery, surprise, or psychological mind games. The role strategy plays in civil litigation is underexamined, which raises two concerns: first, this lack of attention entrenches strategy by default as a procedural value in competition with accuracy, efficiency, and other procedural values. Second, it amplifies the disadvantages experienced by unrepresented litigants. This Article builds on earlier work to examine how courts shape the space that litigants have for strategic behavior, in service of an inquiry into how that space ought to be shaped. Battles over the meaning and rightful place of strategy in civil litigation tend to play out in the arena of “gamesmanship,” a term courts use with increasing frequency to refer to behavior in the gray zone between the clearly allowed and the clearly disallowed. Strategic behavior in this realm is often unregulated by rules, only weakly governed by norms, and subject to significant judicial discretion. Judicial decisions in cases involving gamesmanship frequently expose tensions between respect for zealous advocacy and concerns about fairness and accuracy. This Article makes two contributions to our understanding of the role of strategic behavior in civil litigation. First, it examines the meaning of “gamesmanship” in a litigation context and proposes a categorization of gamesmanlike litigation behavior. Second, it applies this categorization in describing how courts use the term “gamesmanship” and surveys and theorizes how they treat behavior they have thus labeled. I argue that the concept functions as three distinct analytical tools: (1) as an aspect of purposive statutory analysis; (2) as a canon of construction; and (3) as an implied mental-state element. The Article concludes by imagining a different approach.

NOT a recent acceptance but last Feb's paper now on SSRN, w/ many thanks to the excellent editors at Georgia L. Rev. Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

(Newer paper still in the cycle & on a very different topic! Sci. ev., skeptics, democracy. On SSRN soon, but lmk if you want to read.)

Another new article of mine is officially out: “(Re)Individualizing Criminal Law,” (67 B.C L. Rev. 255 (2026): lnkd.in/eR9eF7Fv Abstract 👇 & v. short 🧵
1/6

Nobody asked for this!

Thermophilic bacterium at the bottom of a smoldering compost heap.

Screenshot of gmail settings for autocorrect: "Turn on smart features and personalization in Gmail, Chat, and Meet to use autocorrect"

How manipulative is this? If you turn off gmail's AI summaries (that nobody asked for), no autocorrect for you.

If you had learned, you might still not have been aware of dakhaas. It's not very common slang. I associate it mostly with Utrecht dialect (where you can call someone an achterlijke dakhaas = retarded roof hare), but it may well be used elsewhere, too; not sure.

You may already know this, but in case not: "roof rabbit" (or rather "roof hare," dakhaas) is in fact Dutch slang for cat.

In case you're wondering why I know nothing about anything. (History, philosophy, etc.)

Statistical Thermodynamics
Structure and Reactivity I and II
Molecular Simulations
Advanced Group Theory
Quantum Mechanics

An amicus curiae in the US legal system is not appointed by a court (unlike in NL). It's just a nonparty who decides to submit a brief in an existing case.

Article abstract for "The Affective Tipping Point: Do Motivated Reasoners Ever “Get It”?" by David P. Redlawsk et al. Abstract: In order to update candidate evaluations voters must acquire information and determine whether that new information supports or opposes their candidate expectations. Normatively, new negative information about a preferred candidate should result in a downward adjustment of an existing evaluation. However, recent studies show exactly the opposite; voters become more supportive of a preferred candidate in the face of negatively valenced information. Motivated reasoning is advanced as the explanation, arguing that people are psychologically motivated to maintain and support existing evaluations. Yet it seems unlikely that voters do this ad infinitum. To do so would suggest continued motivated reasoning even in the face of extensive disconfirming information. In this study we consider whether motivated reasoning processes can be overcome simply by continuing to encounter information incongruent with expectations. If so, voters must reach a tipping point after which they begin more accurately updating their evaluations. We show experimental evidence that such an affective tipping point does in fact exist. We also show that as this tipping point is reached, anxiety increases, suggesting that the mechanism that generates the tipping point and leads to more accurate updating may be related to the theory of affective intelligence. The existence of a tipping point suggests that voters are not immune to disconfirming information after all, even when initially acting as motivated reasoners.

The most hopeful research I've come across recently, on this point. Bottom line: everyone has a tipping point.

First signed copies of THE PAIN BROKERS at @barnesandnoble.com Athens! This story that I've held close since 2021 is in your hands now and out everywhere JAN 13.

It feels a little tender & terrifying to share it with the world. I hope that you fall in love with the people in it as I have. ❤️

@nateela.bsky.social

Do you want to see the new filings at the Supreme Court each day? I built a tool to do just that. s2.smu.edu/~tbbennett/d...

This is a fascinating new experimental jurisprudence paper from Chris Jaeger on what is "reasonable."

For laypeople's judgments of reasonableness, the probability of harm (P) has an important effect beyond its role in the B<PL formula.

yalelawjournal.org/article/the-...