Faculty & Staff

Justin

D.

Levinson

Cades Foundation Professor of Law
Director, Culture and Jury Project
Deputy Director, Institute of Asian-Pacific Business Law
Regents' Medalist for Excellence in Teaching

Degrees

LLM, Harvard Law School, 2004
JD, University of California, Los Angeles, 1999
BA, University of Michigan, 1996

Biography

Professor Levinson is a leader in the field of implicit bias and the law and an expert in psychological decision-making in the legal system.  His scholarship, which regularly employs experimental social science methodology, has appeared in the NYU Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, UCLA Law Review, and Duke Law Journal, among others, and has been cited by the United States Supreme Court.  Professor Levinson served as lead editor of Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law, a volume that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012 (co-edited by Robert J. Smith).  He has lectured, taught courses, and trained audiences globally, including in Eastern and Western Europe, East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.

In 2008, Professor Levinson founded the Culture and Jury Project, an interdisciplinary and international research collaboration devoted to facilitating the study of human decision-making in the law.  He is currently collaborating with scholars in China, Japan, and Korea, as well as domestically in the United States.

Professor Levinson previously practiced corporate law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California.  He has served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Beijing University, and as a Fellow at the Culture and Cognition Lab at UC Berkeley.  He regularly teaches Business Associations, Criminal Law, Law and Psychology, and High Growth Entrepreneurship, and has also taught Corporate Finance and Implicit Bias and the Law.

Publications

Books

  • IMPLICIT RACIAL BIAS ACROSS THE LAW (Justin D. Levinson & Robert J. Smith, editors), Cambridge University Press (2012). Amazon | Synopsis at SSRN

Articles

  • Flawed Framework, Fatal Discretion: Unraveling Implicit Bias in Capital Punishment Decisions, 75 Case W. Res. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024, with Rahcel Schaefer). 
  • Racial Bias, Accomplice Liability, and the Felony Murder Rule: A National Empirical Study, 101 Den. L. Review 65 (2023, with G. Ben Cohen & Koichi Hioki).
  • Examining Implicit Racial Attitudes Among College Students in Hawai‘i, 82 Hawai‘i J. of Health & Soc. Welfare 73 (2023, with R. Delafield, H. Kwon, A. Mar, A. Hermosura, E. De Souza & K. Pauker).
  • A Justice-Based Framework For Web3 Venture Investments, 2023 Coller Venture Rev. 36 (with Tim Young).
  • Deadly “Toxins”: A National Empirical Study of Racial Bias and Future Dangerousness Determinations, 56 Ga. L. Rev. 225 (2021, with G. Ben Cohen & Koichi Hioki).
  • Race and Retribution:  An Empirical Study of Implicit Bias and Punishment in America, 53 U. C. Davis L. Rev. (2019, with Robert J. Smith & Koichi Hioki). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Systemic Implicit Bias126 Yale L. J. F. 406 (2017, with Robert J. Smith) HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Diversity, Dialogue, and Deliberation: An Empirical Investigation of Age, Gender, and Meaningful Decision-Making in Korean Juries,  19 Asian-Pacific L. & Pol’y J. (with Jisuk Woo, 2017) HeinOnline | ScholarSpace
  • Judging Federal White-Collar Fraud Sentencing: An Empirical Study Revealing the Need for Further Reform, 102 Iowa L. Rev. (2017, with Mark W. Bennett and Koichi Hioki) HeinOnline | SSRNScholarSpace
  • Judging Implicit Bias: A National Empirical Study of Judicial Sterotypes, 69 Fla. L. Rev. (2017, with Mark W. Bennett and Koichi Hioki) HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Implicit Bias in Hawai’i: An Empirical Study, 37 U. Haw. L. Rev. 429 (2015, with Koichi Hioki and Syugo Hotta).  HeinOnline
  • Implicit White Favoritism in the Criminal Justice System66 Alabama L. Rev. 871 (2015, with Robert J. Smith & Zoe Robinson) HeinOnlineSSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Devaluing Death:  An Empirical Study of Implicit Racial Bias on Jury-Eligible Citizens in Six Death Penalty States,  87 NYU L. Rev. (2014, with Robert Smith & Danielle Young). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Innocent until Primed: Mock Jurors’ Racially Biased Response to the Presumption of Innocence (with Danielle M. Young & Scott Sinnett),10 Plos One 1371(2014). ScholarSpace
  • Implicit Bias in the Courtroom, 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1125 (2012, with J. Kang, M. Bennett, D. Carbado, P. Casey, N. Dasgupta, D. Faigman, R. Godsil, A. G. Greenwald & J. Mnookin) HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • SuperBias: The Collision of Implicit Social Cognition and Behavioral Economics.  45 Akron L. Rev.  591 (2012). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • The Impact of Implicit Racial Bias on the Exercise of Prosecutorial Discretion (with Robert J. Smith), 35 Seattle L. Rev. 795 (2012). HeinOnline | SSRNScholarSpace
  • Implicit Gender Bias in the Legal Profession: An Empirical Study, 18 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol’y 1 (2010, with Danielle Young). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Guilty by Implicit Racial Bias: The Guilty/ Not Guilty Implicit Association Test, 8 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 187 (2010, with Huajian Cai & Danielle Young). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Different Shades of Bias: Skin Tone, Implicit Racial Bias, and Judgments of Ambiguous Evidence, 112 W. Va. L. Rev. 307 (2010, with Danielle Young). HeinOnlineSSRNScholarSpace
  • Race, Death and The Complicitous Mind, 58 DePaul L. Rev. 599 (2009). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Forgotten Racial Equality: Implicit Bias, Decision-Making and Misremembering, 57 Duke L.J. 345 (2007). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Valuing Cultural Differences in Behavioral Law and Economics, 5 ICFAI Journal of Behavioral Finance, 32 (2007, with Kaping Peng). SSRN | ScholarSpace
  • Mentally Misguided: How State of Mind Inquiries Ignore Psychological Reality and Overlook Cultural Differences, 49 How. L. J. 1 (2005). HeinOnline ScholarSpace
  • Suppressing the Expression of Community Values in Juries: How ‘Legal Priming’ Systematically Alters the Way People Think, 73 U. Cin. L.Rev. 1059 (2005). HeinOnline | SSRNScholarSpace
  • Different Torts for Differrent Cohorts: A Cultural Psychological Critique of Tort Law’s Actual Cause and Foreseeability Inquiries, 13 So. Cal. Interdisc. L. J. 195 (2004, with Kaiping Peng). HeinOnline | ScholarSpace

Book Chapters

  • Diverse Voices: A Critical Conversation About Bias, in EXTENDING JUSTICE:  STRATEGIES TO INCREASE INCLUSION AND REDUCE BIAS (with B. Donald & S. Redfield)(B. Donald & S. Redfield, eds., 2023). Carolina Academic Press
  • Implicit Bias:  A Social Science Overviewin ENHANCING JUSTICE: REDUCING BIAS (with Danielle Young & Laurie Rudman) (Sarah Redfield, ed. 2017, ABA Press) (updated version of 2012 Chapter). ABA
  • Biased Corporate Decision-Making? in IMPLICIT RACIAL BIAS ACROSS THE LAW (Justin D. Levinson & Robert J. Smith, editors), Cambridge University Press (2012). Amazon
  • Implicit Racial Bias: A Social Science Overview (with Danielle Young & Laurie A. Rudman), in IMPLICIT RACIAL BIAS ACROSS THE LAW (Justin D. Levinson & Robert J. Smith, editors), Cambridge University Press (2012). Amazon
  • Culture, Cognitions and Legal Decision-Making, in (R. Sorrentino & S. Yamaguchi, eds) Handbook of Motivation and Cognition Across Cultures. Elsevier Press (2008). Elsevier

Related News

Justin Levinson: “If a Black Man Kills a White Cop, Can He Ever Get a Fair Trial?”

New UH/Rutgers Research Questions if ‘Presumption of Innocence’ Doctrine is Fair to Black Defendants

portrait photo

Contact

Phone: (808) 956-3287
Fax: (808) 956-5569

justinl@hawaii.edu

Office

By appointment

Files

Classes

Course #Class TitleSemesterYear
536O
Spring2024
545
Spring2024
530
Spring2022
530
Spring2016
530
Spring2011
530
Summer2013
530
Spring2015
530
Fall2014
545
Fall2023
545
Fall2022