Neurolaw: Brains in the Courtroom
Regular readers of this blog know we often touch on issues about law and neuroscience: whether it’s about crime , the lie detection seminar Emory hosted last spring , or work on ethics and free will . (Also, spoiler alert, neurolaw is to be the focus of our next journal club meeting- please come!) The field of neurolaw, which is exactly what it sounds like- neuroscience and law, has been growing rapidly over the past decade. Most of the discussions in neurolaw focus on how, and if, new discoveries in neuroscience will affect legal definitions of responsibility and culpability by changing the way we understand how the decision to commit a crime is made. However- in the past year there have been several studies looking at another side of brains the courtroom: that is, the neuroscience of judgment itself. These studies are exploring how people consider evidence and how they balance moral and ethical decisions against empathic and sympathetic reactions. This new work opens up new aven...