The Law and Neuroscience Project

CFN recommends the following link to a project which aims to integrate Law and Neuroscience:

"Our Mission

The Time is Now

Neuroscience is a young field, but it has already produced many profound and beguiling discoveries about how the human brain works. While distant developments are hard to predict, it is expected from research that is already underway or being planned that our knowledge of brain functions will expand rapidly during the next few decades.

This new knowledge will increase our understanding of actions that our laws regulate and of attitudes that our laws reflect. How we apply this knowledge can have a major impact on the future of our legal system. With informed and cautious reform, our justice system could have more accurate predictions, more effective interventions, and less bias. Society could have less crime and fewer people in prisons. However, by ignoring or failing to integrate neuroscience properly, we could end up with a legal system that is worse off as a result of unreliable evidence that could send the wrong people to prison and because of widespread skepticism throughout society about law’s basic assumptions.

To avoid such dangers and to improve our legal system, neuroscientists need to understand law, and lawyers need to understand neuroscience. This training has barely begun. A few recent scholarly efforts have brought together neuroscientists and lawyers (Garland 2004, Zeki and Goodenough 2006). (The introduction to Garland 2004 provides a nice survey of the history and current state of law and neuroscience. On related developments in neuroethics, see Marcus 2002, Gazzaniga 2005, and Illes 2006.) Still, this rapidly emerging field is insufficiently theorized and researched. And without a solid, mutual understanding of each others’ fields, lawyers cannot respond rationally to developments in neuroscience, and neuroscientists cannot properly advise lawyers or even recognize the legal relevance of their research.

At present, no systematic program exists to address the difficult legal questions that will inevitably and quickly arise as neuroscience progresses in its ability to understand and manipulate behavior. We need such a program now".