| MacArthur Foundation Launches Law & Neuroscience Project |
Note: MPSA is a governing member of COSSA, which monitors all federal agencies that provide support for social and behavioral research and advocates for a non-politicized research agenda. This article appeared in the October 22, 2007, issue of COSSA Washington UPDATE. For more information about COSSA, visit their website at http://www.cossa.org/.
According to Jonathan Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a survey of MacArthur Fellows turned up a letter from Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky provocatively entitled “Let’s Abolish the Criminal Justice System.”
From Sapolsky’s letter emerged MacArthur’s commitment of $10 million for the Law and Neuroscience Project, co-directed by Michael Gazzaniga, head of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of philosophy and legal studies at Dartmouth College. Gazzaniga won a National Science Foundation infrastructure award a number of years ago to establish a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) archive of brain research. The development of the fMRI and other brain scanning tools has enabled the enormous growth of neuroscience.
MacArthur launched the new project with a symposium held at the Daniel P. Moynihan United States Court House in New York City on October 9. At the symposium, as in the project, researchers, lawyers, law professors, and judges explored the intersection of law and brain sciences on matters of assessing culpability, bias, truth-telling, and other complex issues.
The project’s focus will be on the overall theme of criminal responsibility, with three initial areas where MacArthur will develop a network of researchers and practitioners to examine: 1) diminished brains and the law, 2) decision making and the law, and 3) addiction, neuroscience, and criminal justice policy.
U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, who moderated the symposium, noted the challenges of a slow-changing, skeptical legal system adopting the increasingly rapid advances in neuroscience and brain research. Fanton echoed this, suggesting that the law’s reliance on precedents will also make the acceptance of neuroscience results difficult.
Yet, Barbara Rothstein, head of the Federal Judicial Center, which helps educate judges and will receive funding from the project to teach them about neuroscience, suggested that science and the law have become “inextricably intertwined.” Gazzaniga agreed, pointing out that the recently announced docket for the current Supreme Court term included numerous cases where neuroscience research could play a significant role, from the question of cruel and inhuman punishment in capital punishment techniques to variations of sentences for crack/cocaine addiction.
Henry Greeley of Stanford University Law School, who will co-direct the network on diminished brains and the law, explained how research on brain abnormalities in adults and malformed brains in children can have important effects on how the criminal justice system deals with the question of criminal responsibility. He noted how the system already accepts an insanity defense and asked what this will mean when we have fMRI evidence. He also suggested that issues of memory and false memory would have heightened explication with neuroscience advances as well.
Marcus Raichle of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who will co-direct the network on decision making and the law, stressed the importance of understanding the social implications of the project’s work, particularly with regard to individual differences. Raichle understood that human behavior is what essentially this project is about and that understanding individual judgments and biases, both conscious and unconscious, of all participants in the criminal justice community – police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries as well as the perpetrator – needs exploration.
Stephen Morse of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who will co-direct the network on addiction, neuroscience, and the criminal justice policy, reminded everyone of the overwhelming of the American prison system by drug offenders. He also noted that many have argued to treat addiction using a medical model rather than a criminal justice model. Advances in neuroscience, Morse argued, would help understand the nature and causes of addiction and move this debate forward.
In response to a number of questions from the audience, including one from author Tom Wolfe about the nature of free will, Gazzaniga reminded the audience that personal responsibility usually arises from social norms, not from anything in the brain. At least, that is what we think so far!
For more information about the project, go to http:// www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org .