Roseanna Sommers

Roseanna Sommers studies the many ways in which the law misunderstands people and people misunderstand the law. Much of her work seeks to document people’s intuitions about legal concepts such as consent, autonomy, and moral responsibility. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary field known as experimental jurisprudence, which borrows empirical techniques from the social sciences to clarify core concepts in the law. She studies questions like: How do people determine whether someone is acting voluntarily? How do we think about interferences to autonomy, such as coercion, deception, incapacity, manipulation, and “nudging”? Are our legal doctrines defensible in light of empirical insights from the social and cognitive sciences? Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (Law & Social Sciences Division) and has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Psychological Science, Cognition, Annual Review of Law & Science, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review. She has also published op-eds based on her research in the New York Times and Boston Globe. Prior to joining the Michigan Law faculty, Professor Sommers was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, where she founded the Psychology and Law Studies (PALS) Lab. She holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a JD/PhD from Yale. Between college and graduate school, she was a post-bac research fellow at the NIH Bioethics Department in Bethesda, Maryland. Her interest in consent stems from her time working alongside philosophers, lawyers, health care professionals, and social scientists to provide ethics consultations at the world's largest research hospital, the NIH Clinical Center. 

Related News: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opinion/sexual-consent.html

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/11/02/opinion/predictions-whether-algorithmic-or-human-may-not-be-fair/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/police-phone-privacy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/opinion/sunday/the-real-problem-with-hypocrisy.html