Projects and Research Initiatives
Law and Neuroscience
Gruter Institute participation in the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project
New discoveries in the brain sciences are reported almost weekly. Though the public is aware that new knowledge about the brain contains important information about human behavior, the relation of this knowledge to law is not widely appreciated. Not only is the Institute a leader in creating opportunities for legal scholars and neuroscientists to meet together and discuss possible applications, it has conducted experiments applying the latest techniques in neuroscience to the problems of law and justice. This research has included fMRI scanning projects aimed at better understanding moral decision making and legal rule applications, conducted at the University of London and Humboldt University in Berlin. Further neuroscientific work on such topics as interpersonal trust and intellectual property law is underway.
Free Enterprise: Values In Action
Funded by a Major Grant from the John Templeton Foundation
The Gruter Institute research initiative on “Free Enterprise: Values in Action” is well under way. A major grant from the John Templeton Foundation, along with additional support from the Sloan Foundation have already provided support for several major interdisciplinary meetings focusing on the role of values in a free economic system.
Economics and Business
There is a burgeoning interest in evolutionary and behavioral approaches to economics and business. The overlap of law and economics is well established. Business and other forms of human economic activity are major topics within the law, since law, together with informal rules, provide the “rules of the game” in which markets function. The Institute's research in this area includes investigating: property and human behavior; cooperation and trust between individuals and within firms; behavioral building blocks of free enterprise (that is, what behavioral building blocks are necessary for a system of free enterprise to work effectively: e.g. trust, reciprocity, self-interest, and the effects of personal versus impersonal exchange on these various components); workplace behavior; risk and decision making; and the foundational expectations for commitment and reward which are at the heart of group activities.
Intellectual Property
The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research believes it is time to look once again at the interaction of the rules of intellectual property with the evolved psychology of human beings. In recent years, our understanding of human motivation, thought and behavior has been greatly enriched by the contributions of cognitive neuroscience and related fields. We believe that the emerging synthesis can provide newly fruitful starting points for advancing the study of the law and institutions of both property and intellectual property. The Gruter Institute co-sponsored a one-day workshop, on April 28, 2005 at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences to explore these concerns, and addressed these concerns again in a conference co-sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property in Munich, Germany in September 2006. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the task, we have invited diverse participants from many fields of law, science, industry and practice to participate in the initiative.
A full project summary can be found by downloading the white paper.
Research Initiative Consortium and Collaboration Partners: The Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law (Munich, Germany), The Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Munich, Intellectual Property Institute (London, England), The Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, The Dana Foundation.
Digital Institutions
The Gruter Institute has initiated a program to investigate and envision the field of digital institutions, working in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. The program is focused on a set of related tasks: the design, creation, documentation, and delivery of trustworthy markets, exchange platforms, and business organizations via electronic means, both for the developed and the developing world. The creation of digital institutions requires a pooling of expertise among a variety of disciplines, and this program has brought experts together from fields including law, technology, economics, biology, government, psychology and cognitive neuroscience to share knowledge and help advance the conversation.
The general themes examined by the program include:
(i) common structures and challenges for private economic institutions, e.g. trust, reciprocity, sanctions, social signaling, the role of reputation, status, honesty and cost;
(ii) the human behavioral and cognitive makeup and its relation to these institutions, e.g. dispute resolution and identity;
(iii) the challenges and opportunities which arise from embodying such institutions in a digital medium of interaction, e.g. emergent governance models;
(iv) the technical aspects of meeting these challenges and opportunities, e.g. software and hardware platforms for creation and governance, and interfaces with government and business registries and transactional mechanisms;
(v) the role of the financial system and other private players in creating effective digital institutions, e.g. micro-finance, banking, and payment mechanisms; and
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(vi)the role of law and government; e.g. contracts, corporations, and extra-territorial applications.
Conflict Resolution
The peaceable and just resolution of human conflicts is a central task of the law. While the court system and alternative dispute resolution structures exist to provide this function, there is widespread concern over how to improve these existing processes, providing more satisfactory and economically efficient means to the end. A better understanding of our behavior in initiating, conducting and resolving conflicts will be at the core of such improvements. The Gruter Institute and its Research Fellows are pursuing a number of initiatives in this field, ranging from the study of reconciliation in primates, hormone levels in litigators, and the economics of dispute resolution systems and their alternatives. The Institute has supported conferences and training programs on dispute resolution with such academic partners as Georgetown, Georgia State and the University of Tübingen.
Sense of Justice
Many biologists and legal scholars believe that the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is an innate capacity. For many years, the Institute has maintained a wide range of programs that examine our sense of justice. One initiative is aimed at its development in children- is this a process with critical phases, like language acquisition? What is the relation between the variables of the environment and our shared developmental program and the formation and content of a sense of justice? Another focus of research in this area is understanding how we learn legal rules, and how this compares to moral reasoning and the sense of justice. As part of this program, the Institute has conducted workshops with the University of Munich as well as research on early childhood development at Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Würzburg.
Sexuality and the Law
This is an area that does not lack for public awareness and media interest. It is also an area in which there is a long list of confused issues, such as differences in male and female sexual strategies, sensitivities, and communication. Little attention has been devoted toward better understanding the demand for prostitution and sex trafficking. The Institute is promoting research into such diverse topics as workplace behavior, family law, prostitution and sexual exploitation.
Conferences, Seminars and Symposia
Since its founding, the Gruter Institute has conducted cores of conferences, seminars, panels, workshops and symposia. Topics have included: Neurobiology, Human Behavior, and Law; Law, Biology, and the Sense of Justice; Human Rights; Evolutionary Biology and Business; The Relevance of Ethology for Environmental Law; The Rule of Law, Human Nature and the New Russia; Ostracism; Sex and Reason and Investigating the Basis of Property. In putting on sessions, the Institute has partnered with universities such as UC Berkeley, Cambridge, Dartmouth, George Mason, Georgetown, Georgia State, Harvard, the London School of Economics, Munich, Tübingen, Santa Clara, Stanford and UCLA and with organizations including the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the Mercatus Center, and the Brookings Institution. Leading specialists in myriad fields have presented recent research. The proceedings of many conferences have been published.
Teaching Seminars on Law and Biology
Numerous Gruter Institute programs have helped to educate legal scholars, lawyers and judges about the insights of biology into human behavior. The Institute has conducted several faculty-training seminars directed primarily to law professors and lawyers. They support the development of law faculty to teach scientifically accurate courses, and to conduct research and writing, on law and behavioral biology. Partly as a result of this educational outreach, in 1998 a group of legal academics formed the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL), an independent professional organization with annual meetings and a growing membership.
The Gruter Institute has partnered with the Federal Judicial Center in organizing four-day courses on Law, Human Nature, and Biology for federal judges, co-sponsored by Dartmouth College and Vermont Law School . The Institute also aims similar courses at state judges, in collaboration with the National Judicial College .
Law School Courses
To encourage teaching about the links of evolutionary biology and ethology with the law, the Gruter Institute has assisted in the planning of courses at various law schools. Many Research Fellows of the Institute have introduced seminars on law and behavioral biology at their universities, for example: E. Donald Elliott and Roger Masters at Yale Law School; William Rodgers, Jr. at University of Washington Law School; Owen Jones at Vanderbilt University Law School and Arizona State University College of Law; Ray Coletta at McGeorge School of Law, David Herring and Lawrence Frolik at University of Pittsburgh Law School; Oliver Goodenough at Vermont Law School; Mark Grady at George Mason University and Michael McGuire at UCLA Law School; Wolfgang Fikentscher at University of Munich School of Law; and Manfred Rehbinder at University of Zürich. The Institute actively supports the introduction of such seminars in other law schools both in the United States and in Europe .
Professional Meetings
The Gruter Institute has helped to organize sessions at renowned professional meetings, in which biological perspectives are integrated with diverse disciplines. Examples of such meetings include sessions at the American Anthropological Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the American Political Science Association, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL).
