A 40-year-old schoolteacher begins secretly collecting child pornography and making advances toward his young stepdaughter.1 After evaluation by a psychiatrist and neurologist, an MRI is obtained, and it shows a huge orbitofrontal tumour. As soon as it has been resected, the legally relevant sexual behaviour stops. A few months later, however, the behaviour returns. As becomes clear on MRI, the...

Due to the advent of modern neuroscience, several scientific disciplines have developed entirely new theories, perspectives, and methodologies. The substantial advances discoveries made in this field over last decades, especially those concerned with human cognition behavior, steered course many traditional research areas given rise others, like neuroethics neurolaw. Here we take a look at some...

This Article describes and critiques the increasingly popular program of reductive neuroLaw. Law has irrevocably entered the age of neuroscience. Various institutes and conferences are devoted to questions about the relation between neuroscience and legal procedures and doctrines. Most of the new “neuroLaw” scholarship focuses on evidentiary and related issues, and is important and beneficial. ...

Neurolaw, as an interdisciplinary field which links the brain to law, facilitates the pathway to better understanding of human behavior in order to regulate it accurately through incorporating neuroscience achievements in legal studies. Since 1990's, this emerging field, by study on human nervous system as a new dimension of legal phenomena, leads to a more precise explanation for human behavio...

In Minds, Brains, and Law, Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson argue that current attempts to use neuroscience to inform the theory and practice of law founder because they are built on confused conceptual foundations. Proponents of neurolaw attribute to the brain or to its parts psychological properties that belong only to people; this mistake vitiates many of the claims they make. Once neurola...

Is there such a thing as a criminally “violent brain”? Does it make sense to speak of “the neurobiology of violence” or the “psychopathology of crime”? Is it possible to answer on a physiological level what makes one person engage in criminal violence and another not, under similar circumstances? Current research in law and neuroscience is promising to answer these questions with a “yes.” Legal...

Molecular neuroeconomics of crime and punishment: implications for neurolaw. Acknowledgements: The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (" global center of excellence " grant) This study proposes a molecular neuroeconomic framework for the investigation into crime and punishment. in intertemporal choice, loss aversion, and social...

Criminal behaviors have been associated with risk, time and social preferences in economics (Becker 1968; Davis 1988), criminology (Chamlin & Cochran 1997), and neurolaw (Goodenough & Tucker 2010). This study proposes a molecular neuroeconomic framework for the investigation into crime and punishment. Neuroeconomic parameters (e.g., risk-attitude, probability weighting, time discounting in inte...