Neurolaw: Introduction

Abstract

In recent years, a host of normative questions have surfaced in the wake of rapid progress in the neurosciences and have entered the sphere of legal discourse. They continue to confront legal scholars and increasingly also courts with problems that strike many lawyers as rather unfamiliar within their accustomed domain. Some of these problems seem to be entirely new, others appear to shed new light on venerable and unresolved matters of the law and its philosophical foundations. In a rough and ready differentiation, one can distinguish three perspectives from which to assess these developments. Neuroscience provides (1) new insights (into old metaphysical problems of mind and brain), (2) new ways to peer into, and (3) new ways to intervene in the brain (and hence, perhaps, the mind). The realm of (1) may be fittingly exemplified by the recent outpouring of neuroscientific contributions to the age-old philosophical question of freedom of the will and the attached problem of legal responsibility; (2) refers to new methods of neuroimaging, visualising structural as well as functional features of the living (and working) brain; and (3) points, most notably, to new ways of enhancing mental capacities of healthy people by altering neural circuits in their brains. – Each of the entries in the present section contributes to (at least) one of these spheres of new questions.