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UW LAW SCHOOL INCORPORATES NEUROSCIENCE INTO CURRICULUM
WPR News - UW Law school incorporates neuroscience into curriculum
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Wednesday November 02, 2011
by Gilman Halsted
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(MADISON) Some law students at the University of Wisconsin's Law school have begun taking a closer look at how new brain scan research might change the way criminal sentences are handed down.
The UW-Madison Law school's new double major in law and neuroscience is challenging future lawyers to use new discoveries on how the brain works to make punishment more effectively fit the crime. They're looking at new research from the Macarthur Foundation Research Network on law and neuroscience. Network director Owen Jones laid out the challenge this way at a recent lecture in Madison, "Everything law does is about trying to influence human behavior. There are multiple influences on behavior but those are ultimately perceived and processed through the brains that generate behavior, so in theory improved understandings of behavior might help us increase the efficiency of the legal system."
Owen says increasingly lawyers will have access to brain scans. They can use as evidence of a defendant's responsibility for a crime, "You're a lawyer and you have client the guy robbed a bank or raped somebody or he just wants to get out of contract. What does this mean for somebody who raped or robbed a bank."
Owen says convincing a judge and jury of that claim will depend on how effectively neuroscientists working with lawyers can defend their claims about what a magnetic resonance image of neural activity really means, "This kind of evidence can be persuasive and if it can be admissible then we need to figure out how to get it right."
There is also new research on what a judge's brain looks like when deciding whether to give someone life in prison or a trip to the gas chamber.
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