Professor Avital Mentovich

My research interests lie at the intersections between psychology, criminology and the law. My first line of research is built on the procedural justice framework that was proved to be effective in explaining public attitudes towards law enforcement authorities and institutions, as well as in improving law abidingness. Using both experimental and survey methodology, my past research has examined the impact of procedural justice on perceptions of power and hierarchy as well as the significance of procedural justice to minority groups in Israel.
In recent years, I embarked on a new line of research (conducted together with Orna Rabinovich-Einy from the University of Haifa and J.J. Prescott from the University of Michigan), comparing traditional, face-to-face legal proceedings to online legal proceedings. As the first step of the project, we compared the existence and magnitude of group-based outcome disparities in face-to-face courts to their online equivalents. Our findings documented that while outcome disparities rooted in litigants’ age and race existed in face-to-face proceedings, these disparities disappeared with the change in medium, possibly by circumventing implicit biases (Mentovich, Prescott and Rabinovich-Einy, 2020).
As a next step, we explored the implications of the shift to online courts on litigants’ subjective experience of the legal process and, even more generally, the legal system. Our findings indicate that litigants who participated in online proceedings experienced them as both accessible and fair. We further found that while procedural justice remains a predictor of legitimacy in online settings, perceptions of access to justice were also an important predictor of legitimacy judgment. Interestingly, subjects’ income changed the weight assigned to procedural justice and access concerns. Low income litigants assign greater weight to access to justice concerns whereas higher income litigants care more of about procedural justice. This work was to first to examine the application of the well-established procedural justice-legitimacy model in online legal settings.
These days I am engaged in examining the implications of artificial intelligence on the procedural justice model. The shift from human decision-makers and facilitators to machines challenges deeply-held assumptions in the procedural justice scholarship, and provides a rich setting to study human perceptions of the evolving justice system.