02 Aug 2023
Professor Danielle Jefferis has received a grant from the Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED)’s Layman Seed Program for her project, “The worst of the worst: civil rights cases and the effect of supermax rhetoric on judicial decision-making.” The program funds new projects by early-career faculty who are nontenured at the time of submission.
With the project, Jefferis plans to analyze how certain language impacts litigation and judges’ decision-making in prisoners’ civil rights cases. The language she is focusing on is what she describes as “supermax rhetoric.” This refers to language the government often uses in cases involving supermax prisons and prisoner-plaintiffs, phrases such as “the worst of the worst” or “the most dangerous.”
This type of language, Jefferis said, tends to evoke an emotional response.
“We’re looking to do some really deep analysis of how that works and if there are any patterns that have an impact on the outcome of these cases,” she said.
Part of the inspiration for this project came when Jefferis was representing prisoners at the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. She noticed that the same phrases continued to be used time and time again in the prisoners’ civil rights cases.
“I started thinking about what kind of role this language is serving, because it’s very powerful,” she said. “When you have that kind of evocative language that stirs up emotions, it's really hard to use logic to dispel any sort of ideas or images that come up.”
Professor Jefferis’s research focuses on laws and policy governing prison and detention. This project, she said, is another way to analyze how courts are interpreting protections for incarcerated people while continuing to look at the underlying question of what function courts play.
Looking forward, Jefferis said she hopes to continue to do more interdisciplinary work and draw on other bodies of social science to understand legal issues from a different perspective.
“There’s a lot to do with the law in and of itself, but the law doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” she said.
The project will be co-authored by Professor Nicole Godfrey of the Michigan State University College of Law and Professor Sue Provenzano of the Georgia State University College of Law.