Christian Mott
Christian Mott
Ph.D., Psychology, Columbia University, 2026
J.D., Yale Law School, 2015
B.A., Yale University, 2012
Professor Mott's scholarship focuses on the intersection of legal theory and moral psychology, investigating the degree to which legal doctrine reflects the way members of the public think about culpability, punishment, and the proper interpretation of normative rules.
Professor Mott's scholarship has been published in both legal and empirical journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Psychology, Public Policy and Law, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, and Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Professor Mott serves as an ad hoc referee for peer-reviewed journals at the intersection of psychology, experimental philosophy, and law.
Before entering academia, Professor Mott practiced litigation at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC, and as a loaned associate at Neighborhood Legal Services Program. He clerked for Judge William J. Kayatta, Jr., on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice Peter Rubin on the Massachusetts Appeals Court. He holds a BA and JD from Yale University and a PhD in Psychology from Columbia University.
At Florida State University College of Law, Professor Mott teaches courses on Criminal Law, Criminal Sentencing, and the intersection of law and psychology.
Select Recent and Forthcoming Publications
Judging culpability, harm, and risk: Legal and lay punishments of attempted and completed frauds (with Solomon, L.H.) (in prep.)
When money does not talk: The primacy of apologies over financial restitution in perceptions of redemption (with Dunlea, J., Shaw, A., & Solomon, L.H.) (in prep.)
Control, harm, and punishment: Effects of risk on laypeople’s punishment judgments (with Reklis, K. & Solomon, L.H.) (under review)
Contrasting guilty minds: Exposure to contrast concepts narrows conceptions of acting knowingly and recklessly (with Larisa Heiphetz Solomon), 32 The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 192 (2026
The experimental jurisprudence of persistence through time, in The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence (Kevin Tobia ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Undoing harm: The communicative content of action-oriented and person-oriented punishment (with Larisa Heiphetz Solomon), 119 The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 104749 (2025)
Alternative punishments: How laypeople and judges impose alternative noncarceral sanctions (with Larisa Heiphetz Solomon), 30 Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 326 (2024)
Statutes of limitations and personal identity, 2 Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 243 (2018)