Gruter Institute to Take Part in MacArthur Foundation Grant on Law and Neuroscience

The Gruter Institute is delighted to announce that it will be taking part in a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation aimed at integrating new developments in neuroscience into the U.S. legal system. The Gruter Institute will work together with a distinguished and interdisciplinary group of scientists, legal scholars, jurists, and philosophers from across the country on this Project. The Gruter Institute will lead the education and outreach work under the grant, overseeing numerous yearly conferences aimed at educating state and federal judges and others in the legal arena about neuroscientific findings relevant to the law. The Project is supported by an initial, three-year $10 million grant for the MacArthur Foundation.

For over 25 years, the Gruter Institute has worked to bridge the gap between new discoveries in the brain sciences and the law. With this Project, the Institute will continute to create opportunities for judges and other legal experts to meet together with leading neuroscientists to discuss how neuroscience can shed light on problems of law and justice.

The Gruter Institute will collaborate with the three working groups of scholars and legal experts set up under the grant, addressing the topics of addiction, brain abnormalities, and decision-making as they relate to complex issues such as criminal responsibility. Each working group will be directed by a neuroscientist and a legal expert and will include up to 15 neurscientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and practitioners involved in the legal system, including a judge. Each group will review current research, identify gaps in knowledge and understanding, and develop specific research proposals that would contribute to improved law, policy, and legal proceedings. The Gruter Institute will work to bring the findings from the working groups to the judiciary and to the public at large.

The Project is centered at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and involves scientists and legal scholars from more than two dozen universities nationwide. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor serves as honorary chair. UCSB Professor of Psychology Michael S. Gassaniga, who also directs the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, is the director and principal investigaor. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College, will co-direct the Project.

The working group focused on brain abnormalities will be chaired by Gazzaniga and Hank Greely, Deane F. and Kate Edelman Professor of Law, Stanford University. The group addressing addiction will be headed by Stephen Morse, Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology and Law in Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Desimone, Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the McGovern Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Marcus Raichle, Co-Direcotr, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis and Owen Jones, Professor of Law and Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt will lead the third working group on decision-making.

In addition to O'Connor and Gazzaniga, the Project's board includes Morse, Raichle, Stephen Hyman, Provost, Harvard University; Jed Rakoff, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York; and Fred Schauer, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

"Neuroscience could have an impact on the legal system that is as dramatic as DNA testing," MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton said. "Neuroscientists need to understand law, and lawyers need to understand neuroscience. The MacArthur Foundation has a deep and abiding interest in the application of science to policy and practice, and particularly in bringing scientific findings to bear on the practice of law. We hope this ambitious effort will help to address the difficult legal and ethical questions that will inevitably and quickly arise as neuroscience progresses in its ability to understand and affect behavior."

Proponents of neuroscientific evidence say it can help make the judicial system more accurate and less biased on matters of guilt, punishment, and treatment, on the detection of lies and bias, and in the prediction of criminal behavior. They believe the result could be less crime and fewer people in prisons. Skeptics fear that brain-imaging technology poses a threat to privacy and notions of personal responsibility. Both scientists and legal scholars warn that failing to properly integrate neuroscience and law could harm the legal system by sending the wrong people to prison, and by creating skepticism about some of the law's basic assumptions.

"Neuroscientific evidence has already been used to persuade jurors in sentencing decisions, and courts have admitted brain-imaging evidence during criminal trials to support pleas of insanity," said Gazzaniga. "Without a solid, mutual understanding of each others' fields, lawyers and judges cannot respond in an informed way to developments in neuroscience, and scientists cannot properly advise lawyers or recognize the legal relevance of their current and future research."

Additional information is available on the Project's website at www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org.

Press Contacts:

Monika Gruter Cheney, J.D., Executive Director, Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research

Oliver Goodenough, J.D., Professor of Law, Vermont Law School