How Law and Neuroscience became a new field of study

Abstract

This paper is structured into five sections. Section 1 provides an overview of the nature of the field of law and neuroscience (L&N). Section 2 explains how the field of cognitive neuroscience is more relevant to L&N debates than other neuroscientific domains, a point which, as shown in Section 3, was pivotal to the early work of neuro-lawyers. A short presentation of the set of technologies used to obtain images from the brain and which sustain L&N literature follows in Section 4. In Section 5, a few examples of the impact of neuroscientific outcomes on legal concepts and practices are presented. Some of the arguments advanced by those authors who assert the revolutionary impact of neuroscience on law and by those who predict its irrelevance—or even its dangers—will also be outlined throughout the presentation.