News
- Weaver Program in Law, Brain Sciences, and Behavior
- Weaver Family Program established at VLS with $3.85 million endowment
- Investing in the Emerging Field of Neurolaw
- BBC World Service: Neurolaw and Order
- How Should Justice Policy Treat Young Offenders?
- G2i Knowledge Brief
- fMRI and Lie Detection
- New Paper on Brain Activities During Punishment Decisions
- The Network Press Release
- What, Why and Where to Begin
- Network Overview Knowledge Brief
- Research Network on Law and Neuroscience Granted $1.4M in Additional Funding
- President’s Bioethics Commission Cites Multiple Works of the Research Network
- Neurolaw Listserv
(About / Subscribe / Archive) - Neurolaw Conferences
- News Archives
Featured Publications
- Harnessing the Power of Natural Selection: A New Publication from Prof. Owen Jones
- Goal-Directed Modulation of Neural Memory Patterns: Implications for fMRI-Based Memory Detection
- Coursebook:
Law and Neuroscience - A Primer on Criminal Law and Neuroscience
- Law and Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted to the President's Bioethics Commission
- Court Review: Special Issue on
Law and Neuroscience - Neuroscientists in Court
- Law and Neuroscience
(Journal of Neuroscience) - Brain Imaging for Legal Thinkers: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Through A Scanner Darkly: Functional Neuroimaging as Evidence of a Criminal Defendant's Past Mental States
- Detecting Individual Memories Through The Neural Decoding Of Memory States And Past Experience
- Law and Neuroscience in the United States
Featured Media
- New Conference Videos from the Research Network
- Gideon Yaffe on Criminal Responsibility & Neuroscience (Yale Dean's Lecture)
- Anthony Wagner on Remembering and the Brain: Can Brain Scans Detect Memories?
- Laurence Steinberg, "Should the Science of Adolescent Brain Development Inform Public Policy?"
- Martha Farah on "Law and the Brain"
- Owen D. Jones - Interviewed by Alan Alda, on Law and Neuroscience
The Research Network on Law and Neuroscience focuses on five main legal problems. The first two problems are primarily empirical and concern the challenges for law of ascertaining mental states of defendants and witnesses. The second two problems are also principally empirical and concern questions of a defendant’s mental and behavioral capacities. The final two problems are conceptual and cross-cutting and concern the difficulties that neuroscientific evidence poses for judges making evidentiary decisions. The research can be understood within this conceptual framework (opens as .pdf).
Researchers working on these problems will be:
- Conducting brain imaging studies that will help to improve the detection and classification of defendant mental states and will help to provide a richer understanding of how individuals process information on risk and reward when engaged in criminal acts.
- Conducting a neuroscientific study of normal adolescent brain development and cognition that will help to reveal the neural underpinnings of the maturating psychological capacities relevant to the criminal justice system.
- Conducting neuroscientific studies regarding neural processes correlated with lying and with recognizing previously encountered information.
- Conducting several behavioral and neuroscientific experiments that can illuminate, in ways useful to law, how jurors and judges assess a defendant’s intent and, if he is deemed culpable, decide a suitable punishment.
- Convening a working group to develop legally practical and scientifically valid guidelines for how to draw law-relevant inferences from group-averaged neuroscientific data.