PROFESSOR EMILY SPOTTSWOOD INTERVIEWED BY THE SPARK
September 2024 — 
Professor Emily Spottswood gave an interview to The Spark, a radio program and podcast hosted by NPR-affiliate station WITF.
Emily Spottswood is a Visiting Professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, and she focuses her research on the process of fact-finding in courts, including issues in evidence law, jury decision-making, the structure of trials, and pre-trial procedure. Her interview on The Spark focused on the recent Supreme Court decision Trump v. United States and its new and expansive holding regarding presidential immunity from prosecution. Her conversation with host Asia Tabb was wide ranging, including an explanation on the relationship between the new decision and pre-existing doctrines concerning presidential powers and other types of immunity from prosecution, predictions regarding its likely future impact on courts and criminal behavior more generally, and the impact she expected the decision to have on the conversations in constitutional and criminal law classrooms.
Professor Emily Spottswood focuses her research on the process of fact-finding in courts, including issues in evidence law, jury decision-making, the structure of trials, and pre-trial procedure. One strand of her recent work focuses on probabilistic reasoning and the optimal structure of burdens of proof, arguing that varying sanctions continuously in response to varying levels of confidence in guilt has a number of important advantages relative to the all-or-nothing approach that presently predominates in our trial process. In other work, she has drawn attention to a number of structural biases in the design of jury trials, including problems that may stem from default approaches to the ordering of evidence as well as the suboptimality of standard jury instructions concerning conjunctive and disjunctive reasoning.