Neuroeconomics

Should neuroscientitsts testify in criminal cases?

There is a nice writeup in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the role of neuroscience in determining legal liability for criminal actions. The authors argue that the neuroscience can not influence law because they operate in different domains. Law arises from and only concerns itself, whereas neuroscience (and science, in general) seeks to observe how things occur in nature. In essence, the law is its own universe, and describes how agents should interact. While intentions and mental states certainly matter in the law, a biological explanation of how those agents came to act in particular ways in the past is not necessarily relevant except in the case of insanity.

While forensic science is useful because it can prove what an agent did, neuroscience attempts to explain why agents behaved in a particular way. While insanity may be a legal defense because an insane person may not be legally responsible for their actions, a structural and empirically observable difference in brain structure which may be more common in individuals who display criminal behavior does not necessarily imply that individual is not responsible for their actions. While all insane people are by definition, not responsible for their actions, all people with a similar structural aberration (or phenotype, or psychological history) are not necessarily insane. The authors seem to imply that neuroscientists should stay off the witness stand unless they are describing a condition which in every case necessarily causes the condition of insanity.

The Brain and the Law II

As a followup, the royal society now has a web page up and running on the special issue with this title:  Go here for this link.

The Brain and the Law

If you are interested in the relationship between neuroeconomics and the law, you may want to take a look at our article "The Brain and the Law" a version of which can be accessed at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=224472

More on Law and Neuroeconomics

For people that may be interested in this topic we now have a paper that can be downloaded from my
author page at the SSRN Electronic Library at:

http://ssrn.com/author=365826

Law and Neuroeconomics

Neuroeconomics raises a large number of questions which are going to be relevant to the study of legal systems. One such example can be found in the October 9’th Nature articles on memory consolidation. Research by Fenn et. al., pp 614-616, and Walker et al. pp 616-620, provide some interesting insights into the dynamics of memory and raises some important legal issues like, who owns our memories? At least some components of memory that have been consolidated through long term cellular mechanisms can be interfered with when they are reactivated and as it now seems subsequently reconsolidated. If this is true then it means other individuals could devise strategies to get us to involuntarily reactivate a memory and then interfere with its reconsolidation. If so, then maybe we really don’t own our memories.