Law and Magic Blog

ICYMI: Whaley and Busby on Detecting Deception: Practice, Practitioners, and Theory

ICYMI:

 

Bart Whaley and Jeffrey Busby, Detecting Deception: Practice, Practitioners, and Theory, 6 Trends in Organized Crime 73 (Fall 2000).

 

Of the forty-six types of detectives studied, all but one used the same general procedures to detect deception. (The exception was the adversarial method used by trial lawyers working in the American judicial system.) All others used standard logical systems (both deductive and inductive) in combination with intuitive methods. The more successful detections seemed to be closely associated with intuitive methods, particularly so-called “indirect thinking”. 

Why the Practice of Dowsing Is Still Popular @arstechnica

From ArsTechnica: Scott Johnson and John Timmer examine dowsing and why people still use it to find water. As they  note, "As you'll see in our video, they're actually preying on ignorance. If there's any ground water present at all, geology dictates that it's going to be hard to miss if you dig a well. As a result, dowsers can tell you to dig your well just about anywhere, and you can be assured that the service will "work," in that you'll find some water. As our own Scott Johnson says, it's like hiring someone to tell you which window to open to find some air."

ICYMI: Kurlander on Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich @ekurlander @yalepress

ICYMI:

Eric Kurlander, Stetson University, has published Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents.

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.

Forbidden Histories: An Interesting Website, Blog, and Twitter Feed

If you're particularly interested in the intersection of science and spiritualism, check out the website Forbidden Histories, run by Dr. Andreas Sommer. Contributors study the history of research into the paranormal. There are suggested readings, a YouTube channel, and a Twitter account (@ForbidHistories). 

Calgary (Alberta) Mother Found Guilty of Negligence In Death of Seven-Year-Old Son; Used Holistic Remedies To Treat What Turned Out To Be Strep Infection

A Calgary (Alberta, Canada) judge has found Tamara Lovett guilty of failing to provide her 7 year old son with the "necessaries" of life and of negligence leading to his 2013 death from a strep infection. Ryan was ill for more than a week before he died in his mother's apartment. One of his mother's friends offered to take the boy to a physician but Ms. Lovett refused, preferring to treat him with holistic remedies. Said the judge, “In my view, a reasonable parent would have brought Ryan in to see a doctor when his eardrum burst.” The infection spread throughout Ryan's body, leading to major organ failure. In the view of Alberta's chief medical examiner, antibiotics administered in a timely manner would have saved Ryan's life.

More here.

UNM Bigfoot Conference Causes Comment

From KRQE, via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Taxpayers apparently funded a two-day conference devoted to studying and discussing Bigfoot, which was organized by University of New Mexico, Gallup, professor Dr. Christopher Dyer, at which Dr. Jeff Meldrum and Rob Kryder spoke. Both are Bigfoot researchers. The conference cost about $7500 and took place at UNM-Gallup. Dr. Meldrum received a $1000 honorarium.

According to Dr. Dyer, the conference was well-attended. Benjamin Radford, the Managing Editor of The Skeptical Inquirer, notes that no Bigfoot skeptics were invited. Dr. Dyer responds that he didn't know where to find any skeptics. I suspect he could have asked Mr. Radford, who is easy to find, for some assistance.

After the conference, Dr. Dyer and some others went on a Bigfoot search, paid for by UNM-Gallup (although no UNM-Gallup faculty or students accompanied Dr. Dyer on the trip).

There is now some concern about the conference. Said UNM President Robert Frank, "Dr. Dyer needs to be much more thoughtful about how he undertakes these activities." 

 

More from KUTV.com (Salt Lake City, Utah).

An LSU Special Collections Online Exhibition on the Line Between Science and Philosophy and Magical Thinking

Of interest: An online exhibition on Occult Philosophy and Science in the Renaissance, curated by LSU Special Collections, Hill Memorial Libraries. All the material is fascinating, but take a look at the pages on Alhemy, Science or Sorcery, and The Sixth Sense. 

Link here.

Ofcom (UK) Rules That Derren Brown Program Breaches Broadcasting Code

Ofcom, the UK regulatory broadcasting agency, has ruled that the Derren Brown program "Something Wicked This Way Comes," which aired on Sunday morning, December 6, 2015, breached two provisions of the Broadcasting Code. The program, based on Mr. Brown's 2006 stage show of the same name, breached Rule 1.13: “Dangerous behaviour, or the portrayal of dangerous behaviour, that is likely to be easily imitable by children in a manner that is harmful…must not be broadcast before the watershed…unless there is editorial justification” and Rule 1.14: “The most offensive language must not be broadcast before the Watershed." The agency received five complaints about the program.

Mr. Brown, a well-known illusionist and mentalist, used the "F" word several times during the program, at a time when children were likely to be watching. He also demonstrated several tricks which Ofcom deemed were likely to be dangerous if children imitated them. For example, he used a plastic bag to cover his head, and he walked on glass. He did show that these tricks did not harm him, but the Ofcom regulators found that because the program aired during the period when children were watching, and the network (UKTV) did not attempt to justify the airing of the program during that time period, the airing of the content with its explanatory material did not outweigh the danger to children. It did acknowledge that the network aired the program by error in the time period and that the network is putting safeguards in place to prevent such a mistake from happening again.

Read Ofcom's decision here.

More here from the BBC. 

A New Book On Magic and the Limits of Reason

For the bookshelf:

Between Magic and Rationality: On the Limits of Reason in the Modern World (Vibeke Steffen, Steffen Joehncke, and Kirsten Marie Raahauge, eds.; Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015) (Critical Anthropology).

Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

In Between Magic and Rationality, Vibeke Steffen, Steffen Jöhncke, and Kirsten Marie Raahauge bring together a diverse range of ethnographies that examine and explore the forms of reflection, action, and interaction that govern the ways different contemporary societies create and challenge the limits of reason. The essays here visit an impressive array of settings, including international scientific laboratories, British spiritualist meetings, Chinese villages, Danish rehabilitation centers, and Uzbeki homes, where we encounter a diverse assortment of people whose beliefs and concerns exhibit an unusual but central contemporary dichotomy: scientific reason vis-à-vis spiritual/paranormal belief. Exploring the paradoxical way these modes of thought push against reason’s boundaries, they offer a deep look at the complex ways they coexist, contest each other, and are ultimately intertwined.

Moving From Oooh to Aha: Forensic Science As Science, Not Magic

M. Chris Fabricant, Innocence Project, Inc., and William Tucker Carrington, University of Mississippi School of Law, have published The Shifted Paradigm: Forensic Sciences's Overdue Evolution from Magic to Law. Here is the abstract.

A decade ago a controversial article in Science Magazine predicted a coming “paradigm shift” that would push forensic sciences toward fundamental change as the result of “[l]egal and scientific forces . . . converging to drive an emerging skepticism about the claims of the traditional forensic individualization sciences.” This article argues that the predicted paradigm shift has occurred. We support our thesis through a deconstruction of the jurisprudence of two of the forensic disciplines implicated in numerous wrongful convictions – forensic odontology (bite mark analysis) and forensic hair microscopy – and an examination of a confluence of unprecedented events currently altering the landscape of forensic sciences. The empirical evidence and data gathered here demonstrates that traditional forensic identification techniques, as well as the doctrines supporting them, are ultimately no more than a house of cards built on unvalidated hypotheses and unsubstantiated or non-existent data. Several very serious consequences result, among them that state, and to some extent federal, jurisprudence that stands for the proposition that this type of evidence is admissible is objectively erroneous and must be reevaluated and effectively rejected as valid precedent; and that the long-overdue paradigm shift presents a unique ethical challenge to criminal justice professionals, one that current professional ethics regimes fail to adequately capture, even though fundamental due process norms compel the conclusion that prosecutors, defense attorneys, forensic experts and their respective governing bodies have an ethical, moral and legal duty to revisit affected cases and provide remedies. Put differently, the “path forward” for forensic sciences that the National Academy of Sciences identified in its seminal 2009 report must have a rear-view mirror.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.