Jennifer K. Robbennolt - College of Law

Robbennolt and interdisciplinary team introduce new ‘anomaly detector’ that flags outlier counties in police uses of lethal force

Jennifer K. Robbennolt, the Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law at Illinois; Scott Althaus, director and the Merriam Professor of Political Science at Illinois; Jay Jennings, the assistant director of research and a research scientist; and Ajay Singh, the assistant director of strategic research initiatives and a research scientist.

A new data-driven dashboard produced by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign uses predictive modeling to pinpoint U.S. counties that have unusually high or low numbers of police use of lethal force incidents relative to national benchmarks.

The Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project has compiled nearly a decade’s worth of data identifying police uses of lethal force across the U.S., making it the most comprehensive nationwide record available. It documents any law enforcement discharge of a firearm that risks human life, regardless of whether anyone was killed or injured, as well as any pursuit or other use of force that results in a civilian death.

SPOTLITE’s new “anomaly detector” feature will highlight parts of the country that may be in need of reform — or that might already be doing innovative things to reduce unnecessary uses of lethal force by police, said Scott Althaus, the Merriam Professor of Political Science at Illinois and the director of the Cline Center.

“SPOTLITE’s anomaly detector is the first national-scale resource for directing attention to counties with unusual numbers of lethal force incidents by police,” he said. “Up until now, there wasn’t a way to identify outliers, high or low, at a national scale. With the mountain of aggregated data our team has compiled through SPOTLITE, that’s enabled our researchers to do some modeling that can predict how many incidents we should expect to see in any given county.”

The interdisciplinary team of scholars and experts guiding the SPOTLITE project includes Althaus; Joseph Bajjalieh, a senior research manager at the Cline Center; Jay Jennings, the assistant director of research and a research scientist at the Cline Center; Michael Martin, a senior research coordinator at the Cline Center; Jennifer K. Robbennolt, the Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law at Illinois; Ajay Singh, the assistant director of strategic research initiatives and a research scientist at the Cline Center; and dozens of undergraduate and graduate student researchers who have worked since 2017 to compile the database.

Read the full story at news.illinois.edu.

New paper from Robbennolt and Winship – “From Tweets to Testimony: A Case Study of Apologies After the FTX Collapse”

The two figures that stand beside Alma Mater represent

A new co-authored essay from Professors Jennifer Robbennolt and Verity Winship will be published in the FSU Business Review, as part of the 2026 Symposium on Behavioral Perspectives on Corporate Law. The essay is titled “From Tweets to Testimony: A Case Study of Apologies After the FTX Collapse,” and the abstract follows:

In the wake of the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried delivered a constellation of apologies to a variety of constituents. Bankman-Fried included apologetic statements in a series of tweets, in a letter to company employees, in a host of interviews, and, ultimately, in his remarks at his criminal sentencing hearing. We use the FTX collapse and Bankman-Fried’s apologies to make some observations about the differences between competence-based and integrity violations and the psychology of corporate apologies in the context of highly salient founder-CEOs.

Read the full paper at ssrn.com.

6 faculty present research and provide commentary at St. Louis University Colloquium on Law, Behavioral Science, and Social Science

Professors Jennifer Robbennolt, Kenworthey Bilz, Arden Rowell, Verity Winship, and Bob Lawless pose for a group photo during a colloquium at St. Louis University.

The College of Law was well-represented at the recent St. Louis University Colloquium on Law, Behavioral Science, and Social Science. Professor Jennifer Robbennolt presented a work-in-progress called “’The Rule of Law’ Silo” that is co-authored by Professors Verity Winship and Colleen Murphy. The paper presents the results of a survey to understand what people understand the phrase “the rule of law” to mean.

Professor Arden Rowell presented a paper called “Why Behavior?” The paper develops a model to systematize how different scholarly traditions approach the question of why law & behavior matters.

Professor Bob Lawless and recent graduate Emily Woo ’25 presented a paper that they co-authored with Jennifer Robbennolt and Angela Koo ’25, entitled “Who Gets the Last Word? Interruptions and Floor Control on the Supreme Court.” The paper, forthcoming in the University of Illinois Law Review, began as Emily and Angela’s class project for Empirical Methods. Using data scraped from transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments, the paper reinforces past findings about gendered patterns of interruptions between the justices and also builds a more complex story by focusing on which justices retain floor control after being interrupted.

Finally, Professors Kenworthey Bilz, Lesley Wexler, and Verity Winship were commentators for papers at the colloquium.

Illinois Law faculty, students, and alumni present at LSA meeting

Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

The Law and Society Association Annual Meeting took place in Chicago, Illinois, on May 22–25, 2025, and featured a number of College of Law faculty and JSD students as presenters. Illinois Law professors presenting included Kenworthey Bilz, Bob Lawless, Jennifer Robbennolt, and Verity Winship; affiliated faculty presenting included Jose Atiles and Anna Marshall; and JSD students presenting included Thallyta Cavoli, Elsa Zawedde, and Qiaoyuan Zhi. Among others at the conference affiliated with Illinois were Vanessa Villanueva Collao, JSD ’24; Catherine Grosso, visiting assistant professor from 2005-’08; Dara Purvis, visiting assistant professor from 2010-’13; and So Young Park, JD ’21. The 2025 meeting explored questions central to control and compassion related to the human body, ranging from reproductive justice and LGBTQ equality to disability rights and the death penalty.

Robbennolt presents research at DePaul

Professor Jennifer Robbennolt was a featured presenter at the 31st Annual Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy at DePaul. The symposium focused on the influence of key social science insights on civil justice, including key questions raised by social science scholarship, such as the work of the late Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies selects article by Robbennolt and Winship for publication

Jessica Bregant, Jennifer Robbennolt and Verity Winship pose for a photo together

The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies has selected “Settlementality,” an article co-authored by Professors Jennifer Robbennolt, Verity Winship, and alumna Jessica Bregant, for publication. Slated to be published later this year, the article is meanwhile available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4773926.

According to the authors, “Settlementality” breaks new ground by exploring how everyday people perceive the role of settlements in the legal system. Their novel empirical study provides the first systematic investigation into lay opinions of settlement. They surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults to ask them what they think about settlement. Respondents told them, for example, the extent they agreed or disagreed with statements like these: “A settlement between two parties is nobody’s business but their own.” “Settling parties are more interested in money than justice.” “Settlementality” promises to be a foundational article in an emerging body of empirical scholarship about settlement, reporting for the first-time what respondents thought settlement should look like.

The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies is a peer-edited, peer-refereed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality, empirically-oriented articles of interest to scholars in a diverse range of law and law-related fields, including civil justice, corporate law, criminal justice, domestic relations, economic, finance, health care, political science, psychology, public policy, securities regulation, and sociology.

Robbennolt to present at Annual Dispute Resolution Symposium

Professor Jennifer Robbennolt will speak at the Texas A&M Annual Dispute Resolution Symposium in March. The symposium will explore the roles pudges play in court-connected “alternative” dispute resolution, including referring or ordering cases to these processes and enforcing negotiated/mediated settlement agreements and arbitration awards and overseeing the incorporation and quality of dispute resolution in the courts. The symposium will feature several prominent judges and other law professors.

SPOTLITE data used in report on police-involved killings

Data from the SPOTLITE project, of which Professor Jennifer Robbennolt is a co-principal investigator, was featured in an in-depth report about efforts to create more transparency in Illinois around police-involved killings. Illinois law requires departments to release a report on police-involved killings if no charges are filed, but the patchwork system of reporting leaves many gaps in the record. Illinois Public Media’s reporting helps fill in gaps thanks to data collected by Robbennolt and her fellow researchers.

Read the full report.

Robbennolt elected as APA Fellow

Professor Jennifer Robbennolt has been elected as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, effective January 1, 2025. Fellow status is awarded to those who have demonstrated outstanding contributions in the field of psychology, enhancing the field by their diligent work and commitment. In addition, Fellows are those whose work has had a national impact on the field of psychology beyond a local, state or regional level. On behalf of everyone at the College of Law, we congratulate Professor Robbennolt for this distinguished honor.

Lawless and Robbennolt: Purdue Pharma, Bankruptcy, and Procedural Justice

Professors Bob Lawless and Jennifer Robbennolt co-authored a blog post for Psychology Today, titled “Purdue Pharma, Bankruptcy, and Procedural Justice.” In the post, they discuss how the Sackler family sought a release in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case that would protect them from facing opioid lawsuits, despite not having declared bankruptcy themselves. Many claimants were opposed to a settlement plan and wanted to face the Sacklers in court. The authors argue that psychologists should explore concerns for procedural justice when tort cases are resolved through bankruptcy.

Read the full post.