It’s a seriously happy day for a scholarly team when the fruits of their labour are published. After months – sometimes years – of tireless work, twists and turns, and minor (or major) setbacks, the culminating publication reminds the researchers that it’s all worth it. It signals the completion of at least some aspect of the project, which the team owes funders and stakeholders, but also themselves and humankind. It carries recognition from peers of the rigour and value of the work. And it means the findings have “gotten out there:” the whole wide world – okay, part of it – is finally privy to what the team had been so keen to share all along. As such, it stands a greater chance to make a real impact. 

In my humble opinion, when that team crosses academic disciplines, it means even more.  

My scientific training is rooted in an experimental psychology. While I have broad interests in applied cognitive psychology, my PhD focused almost entirely about memory distortion, which has a natural application to the law. Immediately after my PhD, I worked in trial consulting, during which I explored juror decision-making in both mock and real trial scenarios.  

 Cut to 2019: my friend and collaborator, Dr Jacob Phelps, an environmental social scientist at the University of Lancaster, colloquially described to me a challenge he faced. He was interested in the use of civil lawsuits to remedy environmental harm, such as illegal wildlife trade. But when he asked judges about how they would rule in such cases, he struggled to obtain useful information. Over a casual chat and coffee (the best research ideas are certainly bred over food and drink), a research idea was born: we would present judges with an abridged, hypothetical case in mock trial format, and ask them to make rulings as if they were ruling in an actual case. This way, we could better learn how judges might handle argument and evidence in the context of such a trial. Was I an expert in the scholarship of wildlife conservation? Hardly. Do environmental scientists use mock trial methods in their research? Not so much. But did that stop us? Not in the slightest. The research was too important. There is too much at stake.   

In the end, I joined Dr Phelps and Ms Rika Fajrini, an Indonesian lawyer with experience in forest and land governance, to investigate judicial decision-making in the context of a mock trial about the illegal trade of two baby tigers. You can read about our work in Biological Conservation and hear about key findings here.  

The road was nonlinear. Each of us come from a discipline with its own tradition to form research questions, its own approaches to research design, and its own analytic methods. For me, the Indonesian context of the study provided language challenges, new legal systems and philosophies of jurisprudence to understand, and new cultural norms for working teams in NGO and governmental contexts. There was even disbelief at some point that it the project would “ever work,” given the degree of involvement the project required from our judge participants. And with a raging pandemic, the project lasted longer than expected. But through perseverance, leveraging upon the strengths of our diversity, and the sheer magic (and fun!) of interdisciplinary collaboration, we now know something about judicial reasoning that can promote pro-environmental outcomes.  

And this, by far, was worth the while.  

For more, see Fajrini, R., Nichols, R. M., & Phelps, J. (2022). Poacher pays? Judges’ liability decisions in a mock trial about environmental harm caused by illegal wildlife trade. Biological Conservation, 266, 109445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109445 

Submission by:

Dr Rebecca Nichols

Lecturer, Psychology

School of Social Sciences