LAW AND NEUROSCIENCE
McGovern Institute’s Robert Desimone participates in $10 million MacArthur Foundation Project

Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 9, 2007 – Just as the courts had to come to grips with DNA evidence in the early 1990s, they must now determine what bearing neuroscience can or should have on the law. Robert Desimone, Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the McGovern Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has joined a distinguished group of scientists, legal scholars, jurists, and philosophers brought together by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help integrate new developments in neuroscience into the legal system.

The Law and Neuroscience Project is the first systematic effort to bridge these two fields in considering how courts should deal with new findings in brain research. The Project is supported by an initial, three-year $10 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Desimone will co-chair a working group on addiction. Other groups will address topics of brain abnormalities and decision making as they relate to issues such as criminal responsibility.

“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.”

Neuroscience research can inform assessments of witness reliability as well as the motivations and mental capacities of suspects, and neuroscience evidence is being introduced into legal cases with increasing frequency. For example, brain imaging studies have already supported pleas of insanity, as happened in the 1982 trial of John Hinkley for his assassination attempt on President Reagan.

The Law and Neuroscience Project hopes to address the difficult legal and ethical questions that will inevitably arise as neuroscience progresses in its ability to explain and predict behavior. Without a solid understanding of each other’s fields, lawyers cannot respond in an informed way to neuroscience developments, and scientists cannot properly advise lawyers or recognize the legal relevance of their research. The Project will support scientific advice to the legal profession, as well as public and professional education.

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.

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

For More Information:
Andy Solomon, MacArthur Foundation, (312) 726-8000, asolomon@macfound.org
Melanie Pipkin, Lipman Hearne, (202) 457-8100, mpipkin@lipmanhearne.com