Law And Neuroscience Research

Law and neuroscience, as also called "neurolaw", is an inter-dispilinary field of research on legal issues based on theory, method and means of neuroscience. It has been developing science 1990s and spreads from the United States to the world. The basic topics of law and neuroscience include criminal evidence, free will, mental state related to criminal judgment, juveniles'brains and crime, active ability and consequence identified in civil law, neuroethics, regulation of neuroscience application, and legal decision making. The main defect of law and neuroscience is the lack of clarifying disciplines and their concepts, which contributes to the difficulty in integration and fuzziness in argumentation.The divergence on ontology and methodology in law and neuroscience mainly takes the form of the conflict between eliminativism and anti-eliminativism (unruducibilism, mainly). The character of legal intelligence requires the untheoreticalism of law, while legal theory (theory about law) has the property of theory. The former cannot be eliminated, and the later holds the feature of folk psychology, which makes the communication and integration between law and neuroscience tricky. Take the inter-disciplinary research on intension for example, either position above will be facing its own methodological limitation. Therefore, law research shall take advantage of neuroscientific research, and meanwhile, neuroscience should follow the paradigm of social science to an extent, including law, to design and evaluate its development.Within the context of cognitive science as a general background, the difficulty in the new paradigm of law and neuroscience can be expressed as a translatability problem, which is a problem cognitive science has been trying to solve. In accordance with Rom Harre's epistemology and his theory of grammar, translatability and the conflict between eliminativism and anti-eliminativism is a topic of linguistics or logic. Research of law and neuroscience shall hold the view of compatibilism. New research methods such as semantic data mining and meta-analysis can be possible approaches to establish a certain kind of compatibility among disciplines.Insanity defense in judicial practice is a typical case of application of law and neuroscience. In the United States, there exist different insanity defense rules which were developed over history, accompanied with various legal standards of mental illness, while whether such a defense shall be demolished is constantly under debate. In the contemporary framework of insanity defense, the neuroscientific exam results serve as evidences to explain or support some crucial concept in case law, as forensic medicine has always been doing. Although the probative value of neuroscientific evidence is still under question, the rapid development in neuroimaging, semantic data mining, meta-analysis and machine learning technique provides tools to map cognitive states of brain activity, both individually and collectively of human being. For insanity defense, issue of excuses should be decided in the phrase of conviction while inaccountability should be solved in the phrase of measurement of penalty.