Below is a blog post from one of our 2024 Human Rights Summer Research Grant awardees, Gabe Caress, who spent the summer in Durham, N.C., working with Dr. Juliette Duara to better understand the link between visualization and bias in the U.S. legal system.
To learn more about the Human Rights Summer Research Grant, click here.
artist credit: Gabe Caress
How does one see the world? The minutiae of the eye’s anatomy contributes to the glories and perils of visualization. Light enters the eye through the cornea, illuminating the world. With this illumination comes benefits and harm.
Visualization helps us understand accessible information, scan our surroundings, and identify those around us. However, visualization also fuels bias. With complex layers of bodily anatomy, but also complex societal history, built into the concept of sight there remains much unknown.
The justice system operates as if it were blind. However, this binding assumption is what truly blinds us. My summer research through the Duke Human Rights Center has focused on assessing visualization and subsequent bias in the legal system. My work with Dr. Juliette Duara has helped me understand that to clear our line of sight and remove bias, we must emphasize community.
Dr. Duara and I began by working through documentaries, legal cases, and more general pieces surrounding inequality in society and law. These case studies were all oriented around the concept of balanced justice.
Balanced justice weighs blindness and amelioration. The world of blind justice as defined in this project as a place in which all identity factors are removed from legal cases. Currently, anonymous juries are used in some trials, but this effort is to protect jurors, not defendants. Ideally, in the world of blind justice, everyone’s identity would be protected. Defendant, defense, prosecutor, judge, jury — anyone involved would remain anonymous. Blind justice primarily serves as a balance to ameliorative justice and is not meant to stand alone. Blind justice is also highly hypothetical in nature seeing the large amount of logistical factors that would need to be organized to achieve it. Ameliorative justice entails extra steps to suppose justice. This type of justice requires an understanding of societal inequality and accounts for that injustice outwardly — taking additional steps to equalize the playing field.
To achieve balanced justice, looking into education and the way standardized tests address, or fail to address, bias in our legal system represents a salient next step. Looking at the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE) is central because it is a prerequisite for admission to all bars except in two US jurisdictions. The exam deals with established standards for US lawyers who can then go on to serve in a variety of roles, such as judges, advocates, and counselors — to name a few. The exam is meant to assess prospective lawyers' knowledge of ethical rules, not to assess their ethical values; however, in an attempt to avoid this, there is a toll taken on the validity and reliability of the test itself regarding situations closely related to identity. Our findings are that the MPRE seems to largely ignore identity-oriented aspects of law. Looking at a set of sample questions, it would seem that perhaps every one out of fifteen even begins to touch upon identity factors as previously defined. This exam, therefore, fails to establish guidelines for synthesizing identity into law. The lack of these questions fuels bias and stigma, perpetuating cycles of oppression through legal means.
To rectify this gap, my research centers around the development of a website surrounding identity factors, contributors, and manifestations. Identity categories are broken down into internal, external, and combination categories. Change starts with education: this website represents a grassroots step for legal professionals aiming to learn more. Teaching the next generation of lawyers and judges to synthesize experience and identity in the courtroom is critical to clearing our line of sight so that our society can achieve balanced justice.