About

Lesley Wexler is a faculty member associated with The Program in Arms Control & Domestic and International Security at the Illinois Global Institute. She is part of the College of Law at the University of Illinois, located at 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Champaign, IL. Her contact email is lmwexler@illinois.edu. Wexler's work focuses on issues related to arms control, security studies, and international security, contributing to the academic and policy discussions within these fields. She is involved in the Program in Arms Control & Domestic and International Security, which aims to advance understanding and policy related to global security challenges.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Law
• Finance
• Business

Selected publications

• Service Members' Reactions to Amends for Lawful Civilian Casualties

  2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Political Science

  When states engage in armed conflict, militaries often kill or seriously injure civilians. Sometimes the actions that lead to these deaths and injuries violate the law, but often the laws of war that govern collateral damage permit them. International and domestic law, however, say little about re-dress for these lawful harms. As a practical matter, when civilians are lawfully killed during armed conflict, states tend neither to directly acknowledge causal responsibility nor to make promises of non-repetition, though they may provide small monetary payments as an expression of sympathy to affected families — disbursements known as condolence or solatia payments. In contrast, making amends for lawful harm offers both the injured and the injurer a more fulsome mechanism for addressing that harm. Civilians and their families and communities may benefit from a recognition of their loss, an explanation of the circumstances that led to the harm, attention to the prevention of future harm, financial repair, and a showing of respect. From states’ perspectives, offering amends has the potential to further important military objectives, address soldiers’ moral injuries, and contribute to the professionalization of the military. In the study we report here, we use experimental and survey methods to begin to explore service members’ views of amends making generally and their reactions to different forms of responding in the aftermath of a lawful civilian casualty. We find that most service members did not see the lawfulness of harm to civilians as a barrier to offering a response, nor did it preclude their feelings of remorse. In addition, we find substantial support for various aspects of amends –particularly for apologies and review of policies in the aftermath of lawful harm. In contrast, service members tended to see a typical — relatively low-dollar — solatia payment as an insufficient response to lawful harm. Our results also demonstrate the ways in which remorse, moral values, and emotion, along with a tendency to shift obligation to victims following an official response, play important roles in the reactions of service members. In addition, the questions that we raise speak more generally to other settings in which the law permits harm to others. This includes other international military harm settings, but also domestic, non-military, settings such as non-negligent police uses of force that result in death or serious harm.

• MeToo and Law Talk

  2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How Americans talk when they talk about #MeToo is often deeply rooted in the law—even in non-legal settings, participants in the #Me-Too conversation often deploy legal definitions of victims and perpetrators, reference legal standards of proof and the role of legal forums, draw explicit or implicit comparisons to legal punishments, and derive meaning from legal metaphors and legal myths. In this essay, I identify and assess the deployment of such law talk to help understand both how legal rhetoric may facilitate the national #MeToo conversation and related legal reforms, but may also simultaneously limit and obscure some of the #MeToo’s more transformative possibilities. Such critical engagement seeks to open space for selective pushback, including initial thoughts on the possibilities of reclaiming colloquial law talk to better match the interests at stake in non-legal settings as well as bringing to the forefront the therapeutic, informative, and structural issues law talk might crowd out.

  PublisherOA PDF

• MeToo and Law Talk

  2019-11-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How Americans talk when they talk about #MeToo is often deeply rooted in the law—even in non-legal settings, participants in the #Me-Too conversation often deploy legal definitions of victims and perpetrators, reference legal standards of proof and the role of legal forums, draw explicit or implicit comparisons to legal punishments, and derive meaning from legal metaphors and legal myths. In this essay, I identify and assess the deployment of such law talk to help understand both how legal rhetoric may facilitate the national #MeToo conversation and related legal reforms, but may also simultaneously limit and obscure some of the #MeToo’s more transformative possibilities. Such critical engagement seeks to open space for selective pushback, including initial thoughts on the possibilities of reclaiming colloquial law talk to better match the interests at stake in non-legal settings as well as bringing to the forefront the therapeutic, informative, and structural issues law talk might crowd out.

• MeToo and Procedural Justice

  2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This symposium talk addresses the role of due process and other formal legal concepts relating to procedural justice that have arisen in the national #MeToo conversation. As questions of due process are becoming increasingly detached from their formal legal settings and often applied unreflexively - and to my mind often inappropriately - to non-legal settings, this talk provides lawyers, citizens, and commenters the tools to intervene in the #MeToo conversation and help craft and reinforce more appropriate fairness norms in non-legal settings.

  Publisher

• 2018 SYMPOSIUM LECTURE: #METOO AND PROCEDURAL JUSTICE

  2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Importance of Professionalism: Addressing Discrimination, Exporting Military Values, and Maintaining Civilian Ethics

  2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• #MeToo, Time's Up, and Restorative Justice

  2018-01-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• #MeToo, Timees Up, and Theories of Justice

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Red Lines and Chlorine Weapon Use in Syria

  2018-02-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Designing Amends for Lawful Civilian Casualties

  2017-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In January 2015, a U.S.-initiated drone strike in Pakistan accidentally killed U.S. citizen Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto. President Obama compensated the families and gave a long speech in which he indicated that he "want[ed] to express our grief and condolences to the families of two hostages." The President justified his declassification and disclosure of this strike "because the [] families deserved to know the truth." He also offered the following mea culpa: "As President and as Commander-in-Chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations . . . . I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States Government, I offer our deepest apologies."

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer K. Robbennolt

  19 shared

• Arden Rowell

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  14 shared

• Colleen Murphy

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  7 shared

• Jonathan Klick

  University of Pennsylvania

  2 shared

• Jonathan S. Masur

  2 shared

• Jonah B. Gelbach

  2 shared

• Jason Webb Yackee

  1 shared

• David A. Dana

  1 shared