Overview
- Provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of what can be said about brain development and age thresholds
- Explains how actual law and court cases have already been influenced by neuroscience
- Interdisciplinary in scope, combines neurobiology, psychology, and law
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Law, Neuroscience, and Human Behavior (PASTLNHB)
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About this book
This open access book is the first to offer a systematic overview of the different methods for assessing brain development and a comparative review of how such assessments have already influenced the law. Lawmakers prefer to draw clear distinctions, but biology is characterized by continua: both in terms of how development proceeds within a person and how it differs from other people. However, this does not mean that age limits are arbitrary. This book extends the author's previous research on the Dutch juvenile criminal law, which was founded on the brain development of adolescents and has been in use for more than a decade. The role of age limits in death and life sentences in the US and the new cannabis legislation in Germany are also analyzed in depth. This project combines biological, psychological and social knowledge and puts forward a pragmatic proposal to connect the two fields of brain development and law. It will be of interest to researchers, professionals (e.g. judges, legislators) and students alike.
Keywords
- Neurolaw
- Brain development
- Brain maturation
- Legal responsibility
- Criminal law
- Penal law
- Age thresholds
- Open Access
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Stephan Schleim is Associate Professor of Theoretical Psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands and a well-known science writer, particularly in German-speaking countries. He has been publishing with Springer Nature and its associates continuously since 2005 and his writing has been translated into several languages. His German-language book Brain, Psyche and Society (2021) recently hit 250,000 accesses on SpringerLink and his most recent book Mental Health and Enhancement (2023) was published open access with PalgraveMacmillan, in the same series as Brain Development and the Law. Thus far, Schleim was principal investigator of two related research projects (VolkswagenFoundation, Dutch Research Council) and wrote and edited more than ten books, besides publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals. His scholarly articles on Frontiers commonly belong to the top 10% most accessed of all publications.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Brain Development and the Law
Book Subtitle: Neurolaw in Theory and Practice
Authors: Stephan Schleim
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Law, Neuroscience, and Human Behavior
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Author(s), 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-72361-2Due: 28 November 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-72364-3Due: 28 November 2025
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-72362-9Due: 28 November 2024
Series ISSN: 2946-5192
Series E-ISSN: 2946-5206
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 78
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 14 illustrations in colour