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Welcome to the Gruter Institute |
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ADVANCING INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND TEACHING IN LAW AND THE BIOLOGICALLY INFORMED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research brings together a multidisciplinary network of distinguished scholars from the United States and abroad to pursue interdisciplinary research and teaching in law and the biologically informed behavioral sciences.
The scholars and scientists associated with the Institute see a need for the law and other social sciences to be informed about the biological bases of human behavior, in addition to understanding information from the traditional social sciences. To this end, education and communication among law professors, judges, economists, scholars from numerous other social sciences, and behavioral biologists are a primary aim of the Institute. Workshops, symposia, conferences, and interdisciplinary working teams continue to be organized to carry out the goals of the Institute. Results of these efforts are disseminated in written form in scholarly journals, books, and in special publications of the Institute.
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Gruter Institute to Take Part in MacArthur Foundation Grant on Law and Neuroscience |
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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.
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Read more...
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Gruter Institute Research Fellow Owen Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, was featured in a Law Times (a Canadian legal publication) article entitled Neurobiology makings its way into trial evidence. Jones discussed how recent advances in neurobiology are creating a new kind of scientific evidence such as brain scans and stated that U.S. courts "don't have any systematic way of treating the information at present." The article focused on a case in which a man accused of committing acts of pedophilia suffered from a brain tumor, which arguably caused the change in the man's sexual urges. Also featured in the article was the work of Marc Hauser, a Harvard University psychology professor and former Gruter Institute conference participant, on the connection between the emotional and decision-making centers in the brain.
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