Minds, Brains, and the Law

Penn's Neuroscience Boot Camp

The University of Pennsylvania announces their 3rd annual Neuroscience Boot Camp, July 31-August 10!

Why Neuroscience Boot Camp? Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications.  Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of philosophy, sociology, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work.  Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role.

The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp gives participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and equips them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research.

What happens at Neuroscience Boot Camp?  Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. Each lecture will be followed by extensive Q&A.  Break-out groups allow participants to delve more deeply into topics of relevance to their fields. Laboratory visits will include trips to an MRI scanner, an EEG/ERP lab, an animal neurophysiology lab, and a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab. Participants will also have access to an extensive online library of copyrighted materials selected for relevance to the Boot Camp, including classic and review articles and textbook chapters in cognitive and affective neuroscience and the applications of neuroscience to diverse fields.  See http://lawneuro.typepad.com/the-law-and-neuroscience-blog/2009/08/bloggin-from-boot-camp-day-one.html for a daily blog post from our first Boot Camp.

Who should apply? College and university faculty, working professionals and graduate students are encouraged to apply.  The only prerequisites are a grasp of basic statistics and at least a dim recollection of high school biology and physics.  (A short set of readings will be made available prior to the Boot Camp to remind you about the essentials.) 

More details: Participants will be housed on campus in air-conditioned apartment-style suites with private bedrooms.  Sessions begin at 8:30 AM and end at 5:15. Breakfast and lunch will be eaten with the group; dinners are on your own. The academic program spans nine days, Monday, August 1st - Wednesday, August 10th with half of Saturday and all of Sunday off.  There will be an opening reception on the evening of Sunday July 31st and a gala dinner on the last evening.

The cost of tuition, room and board is $4,500; limited scholarship support is available.  Complete applications are due by midnight on February 1st.  You will be notified of the status of your application by March 7th, and will have until April 1st to confirm attendance.

Visit http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/events/neuroscience-bootcamp for more information! 

Ethics and the Brain

The University of Missouri is hosting an exciting conference in March entitled, "Ethics and the Brain."  Speakers include Steven Pinker, Patricia Churchland, Adam Kolber, Jesse Prinz, Adrian Raine, Nancey Murphy, and Joseph Dumit.  

Law & The Brain

There is an exciting upcoming conference with an all-star cast of legal scholars, judges, philosophers, and neuroscientists entitled, "Law & The Brain: How Recent Advances in Neuroscience Impact the Law." Several members of LANP will be presenting on a wide variety of topics including neuroimaging and the law, the neuroscience of addiction, neuroevidence in the courtroom, and neural lie detection--to name just a few. It ought to be both informative and illuminating.

TILTing Perspectives on the Stand

TILTing Perspectives is a series of bi-annual international conferences, organized by the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. TILT is a multidisciplinary institute conducting research into the legal and social implications of various emerging (fields of) technologies, ranging from information and communication technologies, to bio- and nanotechnologies, to neurotechnologies and robotics.

TILT is happy to announce the next conference of this series, entitled

TILTing Perspectives 2011: 
Technologies on the stand: Legal and ethical questions in neuroscience and robotics

This conference focuses on the legal and ethical questions raised by the application of neuroscience and robotics in a number of contexts. Think, for instance, of the following examples:

• the use of  neurotechnologies in the legal arena, in therapy, and for human enhancement;
• the advent of robot technologies in home and hospital environments, but also in war.

For more details on the theme and subject area of this conference, please see the call for papers

In this two-day conference we aim to bring together national and international experts from the fields of law, robotics and neuroscience, and to facilitate discussion between lawyers, legal scholars, psychologists, social scientists, philosophers, neuroscientists and policy makers. 

Key details:

• Conference dates: 11 and 12 April 2011
  
• Conference location: Tilburg University, Tilburg, the Netherlands
  
• Registration: opens on 1 October 2010; closes on 5 April 2011
  
• Submission of abstracts: opens on 1 September 2010; closes on 15 October 2010
  
• Submission of full papers: opens on 1 October 2010; closes on 15 December 2010
  
• Reviewer feedback on full papers: sent to authors on 31 January 2011(at the latest) 
  
• Final revised papers due: 1 March 2011

Call for Abstracts

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

The European Centre for Life Sciences, Health and the Courts, University of Pavia, in cooperation with the Court of Milan, Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia and the international group on Neuroscience & Law, announces the International Conference:

“Neuroscience in European and North-American case-law and judicial practice”

September 17th, 2010 - Milan (Italy)

Neuroscience is currently used referring to a bundle of disciplines, which study the human brain and its relation to mental activity and behavior. Behavioral genetics has a similar aim, with reference to the genetic makeup. Neurogenetics combines, in different ways, the two previous approaches.

Since 2002 scholars have debated how neuroscientific findings, neuro-cognitive methods and new diagnostic techniques (especially brain imaging) may impact on the existing legal categories. As a matter of fact a growing number of scholars and legal practitioners are studying how these methods can be used with forensic purposes. It seems indeed clear that a better knowledge of the biological basis of human behavior might have important consequences in the law, under many respects.

Besides, the possibility to use scientific methods in order to determine mental states impacts both on criminal liability and all areas of the legal system. This challenge has arisen, in these terms, in different States less differently than we imagine.

The greatest enthusiasm has been in the United States, where a worldwide debated case law has developed. Throughout Europe there is now the necessity, on one side, to understand whether there is a unknown use of such neuroscientific techniques and, on the other side, to train judges and legal practitioners to properly understand and use these new methods.

The topics (and sessions) of the conference are:

1. Prospects of Neuroscience

2. Impact of Neuroscience on the European and American Law

3. Brain Interfaces and Legal/Ethical problems

4. Are legal systems Neuroscience-friendly?

Workshops on Moral Agency, Deliberative Awareness, and Conscious Control

Amy Wouters has asked me to post an announcement for the followings series of workshops in the Netherlands:

Three workshops on Moral Agency, Deliberative Awareness, and Conscious Control

Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands


Friday and Saturday 15–16 October 2010: Strawsonian and Consequentialist Views on Personal Responsibility

Friday and Saturday 16–17 September 2011: Everyday Reason Talk

Friday and Saturday 8-9 June 2012: Narrativity, interpretation and responsibility

Workshop on Moral Biology

Conference: April 15 & 16 (2010):

Along with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, the Gruter Institute, and the MacArthur project on law and neuroscience, the Project on Law and Mind Sciences is hosting two-day conference entitled "Moral Biology?: What Can Biology and the Mind Sciences Teach Us about Law and Morality?"

The conference will examine what relevance developments in the mind sciences and evolutionary biology may have for moral and legal reasoning about responsibility, punishment, racism, cooperation, and addiction.  The event features a public panel open to all (taking place on Thursday April 15 at 5:30 PM at Harvard Law School) as well as several closed-door sessions.  I've attached the nearly final agenda.

There are a small number of spaces available for the closed portions of the conference.  If you would like to attend the conference or any of those sessions, please let me know.  I will do everything I can to make certain that you are added to the attendance list.  However, to do that, I unfortunately need to hear from you before this Wednesday  (04/07) at noon.  Contact Jon Hanson for more information.

Conference on Bioprediction

The LANP--along with the Oxford Center for Neuroethics--is sponsoring an upcoming conference on bioprediction (see here for details).  The conference will take place in Washington DC from May 8th through the 9th immediately leading up to the annual meeting of the Neuroethics Society.  Both events should be interesting and informative.  So, hopefully, we will see some of you there!

Neuroscience, Evolution, and Morality

There is a forthcoming conference in March at College of the Holy Cross on Neuroscience, Evolution, and Morality.  See here for more details. 

Thursday-Friday, March 18-19, 2010
Conference fee: $35 (optional Thursday dinner: $20 additional)
Space is limited. Register online now! (Holy Cross faculty, staff and students, please register here.)

How does what we are learning about the brain through neuroscience and evolutionary science influence how we ought to think about ethics? Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have increased scientists’ understanding of how our brains process moral decisions. Some thinkers suggest that moral decision making is fundamentally an intuitive or emotional process, and that what we call “reason” is a post-decision making method of justification for actions, not a “higher order” process for making decisions. If so, the new science challenges the principle of free will, the argument that reason is the foundation of moral decision making, and the importance of understanding intentions before judging responsibility for action. The potential implications for most Western ethical traditions are enormous.

This two-day conference will bring together some of the world’s leading neuroscientists, moral psychologists, ethicists, including:

• Kenote speaker Michael Gazzaniga, professor of psychology and the director for the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California Santa Barbara;
• Patrick Haggard, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London;
• Ethicist Robert Kane '60, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Texas at Austin;
• Marc Hauser, Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, Harvard University;
• Joshua Greene, Moral Cognition Lab, Harvard University;
• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies, Dartmouth College, and co-director of the The MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project
• Anne Harrington, professor and chair, History of Science, Harvard University
• James Blair, chief of the Unit on Affective Cognitive Neuroscience in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program, National Institute of Mental Health
• Jeanette Kennett, Department of Philosophy and Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Australia
• Stephen J. Pope, professor of theology, Boston College
• Rachana Kamtekar, associate professor of philosophy, University of Arizona

The Gifford Lectures

Our own Michael Gazzaniga was recently honored with the opportunity to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures--joining the ranks of renowned thinkers ranging from William James and John Dewey to Hannah Arendt and Carl Sagan.  Fortunately, his series of talks have been posted on-line.  So, without further ado, you can find all of the lectures below the fold...