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Neurolaw is an emerging field of interdisciplinary study that explores the effects of discoveries in neuroscience on legal rules and standards. ^[1] It is also the subject of a 2007 article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "The Brain on the Stand".^[2] Drawing from various fields of study (neuroscience, philosophy, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to name but a few), those who study neurolaw seek to address not only the descriptive and predictive issues of how neuroscience is and will be used in the legal system, but also the normative issues of how neuroscience should and should not be used within the legal system.

Some questions to which neurolaw practitioners seek answers include:

• How will increasingly accurate lie detection technologies impact our court system?

• How will new insight into brain disorders affect legal notions of intent and culpability?

• How would legal standards (such as self-defense, sentencing, intent to kill, competence to stand trial, cruel and unusual punishment…) change in the face of developments in neuroscience? Should they change?

• Who should be responsible for the integration of new neuroscience into our legal system - judges, legislators, executive leaders, scientists, or some combination thereof?

• How might neuroscience-based understanding of behaviors such as addiction lead to changes in sentencing or treatment guidelines?

• How is neuroscience evidence being used by legal decision makers? Is the evidence being used appropriately?

See also

Popular Press Articles

Rosen, Jeffrey (2007). The Brain on the Stand. New York Times. Magazine section, March 11.

Carlat, Daniel (2008). Brain Scans as Mind Readers? Don’t Believe the Hype. Wired Magazine, May 18. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-06/mf_neurohacks

Talbot, M (2007). Duped: Can brain scans uncover lies? New Yorker vol. July 2 pp. 52-61.

Lehrer, J. (2008). Misreading the Mind: We’re looking for too much in brain scans. Los Angeles Times, Jan 20.

Neuroscience Articles and Reviews

Logothetis, N (2008) What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI. Nature 453 (7197) pp. 869-78.

Haynes and Rees (2006) Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans. Nature Reviews Neuroscience: 7 (7) pp. 523-534.

McCabe, DP, and AD Castel (2008). Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition 107 (1) pp. 343-52.

Weisberg, DS, FC Keil, J Goodstein, E Rawson, JR Gray (2008). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. Journal of cognitive neuroscience. 20 (3) pp. 470-7

Burns, JM and RH Swerdlow (2003). Right orbitofrontal tumor with pedophilia symptom and constructional apraxia sign. Archives of neurology 60 (3) pp. 437-40.

Wager, TD, JK Rilling, EE Smith, A Sokolik, KL Casey, RJ Davidson, SM Kosslyn, RM Rose, JD Cohen (2004). Placebo-induced changes in FMRI in the anticipation and experience of pain. Science 303 (5661) pp. 1162-7

Law Review Articles and “Neurolaw” Scholarship

Greely, H and J Illes (2007). Neuroscience-based lie detection: The urgent need for regulation. American Journal of Law and Medicine 33 pp. 377-431.

Roskies, A. (2008). Neuroimaging and inferential distance. Neuroethics 1 (1) pp. 19-30.

Feigenson, N (2006). Brain imaging and courtroon evidence: on the admissibility and persuasiveness of fMRI. International Journal of Law in Context 2 (03) pp. 233-255.

Mobbs, D, HC Lau, OD Jones, CD Frith (2007). Law, responsibility, and the brain. PLoS Biology 5 (4) pp. e103.

Morse SJ. (2007) The non-problem of free will in forensic psychiatry and psychology. Behavioral Sciences and the Law 25 pp. 203-220.

Books

Frith, C (2007) Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World. Blackwell Publishing.

References

External links

• The MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project homepage
• Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law
• Neurolaw: The Scales of Justice
• NPR: Jeffrey Rosen on 'Neurolaw' in the Courtroom
• Neuroethics & Law Blog