A survey of law and neuroscience

A CIAN seminar with Jeffrey Schall

Professor, Dept. of Biology

About the seminar

For as long as humans have had laws they have interacted with neuroscience, because brains are the source of the behaviour that law is designed to influence. The interaction of law and neuroscience became a vivid area of inquiry and domain of policy in the mid-2000s when the MacArthur Foundation funded meetings and projects that encouraged conversation and collaboration between legal scholars, judges, and neuroscientists. One of the products of that collaboration was a law school coursebook entitled Law and Neuroscience. This presentation will survey the scope of this interdisciplinary area by summarizing the contents of the second edition of that book.

About Jeffrey Schall

Schall joined the YorkU faculty in 2021 after rising through the ranks at Vanderbilt University. In general terms, his research has been focused on the neural mechanisms of decision-making. Of relevance for this presentation, he has been collaborating for several years with legal scholars at Vanderbilt and elsewhere under the auspices of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. With law professors Owen Jones (at Vanderbilt) and Francis Shen (at University of Minnesota and Harvard) he co-authored the first coursebook for law students in Law and Neuroscience.