Vol. III · Established MMXXIII

Cognition Review

Independent scholarship at the intersection of law, psychology, and the questions of the day.

From the Current Issue

The Cognitive Architecture of Reasonable Doubt

By Eleanor M. Hargrove, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School·April 18, 2026

The reasonable-doubt standard, long treated as a fixed epistemic threshold, in practice operates as a heuristic constructed under conditions of cognitive load. Drawing on recent work in dual-process theory and probabilistic reasoning, this Article argues that current jury instructions systematically misdescribe the inferential task they purport to govern.

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Also in this issue

Case Comment

United States v. Rahimi and the Limits of the Historical Method After Bruen

Samuel J. Okonkwo · March 22, 2026

The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Rahimi clarified that the historical analogue required by Bruen need not be a dead ringer. This Comment examines what that concession reveals about the workability of an exclusively historical mode of Second Amendment adjudication.

Essay

Memory, Confidence, and the Witness Stand

Priya Ranganathan · February 14, 2026

An essay on the persistent gap between what jurors believe about eyewitness memory and what four decades of research have demonstrated. The problem, the author suggests, is not ignorance but a particular kind of confidence the courtroom is structured to reward.

Current Events

The Administrative State After Loper Bright

Margaret Ashworth · January 30, 2026

The interment of Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo has been widely described as a transfer of interpretive authority from agencies to courts. The more consequential transfer, this piece argues, runs in a different direction.

Article

Trauma-Informed Procedure and Its Discontents

David Halloran · November 9, 2025

Reforms grouped under the heading of trauma-informed procedure have spread rapidly through American criminal justice. This Article asks whether the empirical premises on which those reforms rest can bear the doctrinal weight now placed upon them.

A Note from the Editors

"We publish work that takes its questions seriously and its conclusions provisionally — scholarship in the older sense of the word."

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