The neuroscience of love

Today we find a well written article on research into the conflict between the front and middle brain:
It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they [...]

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Causes of wrongful convictions

If you have a subscription or google the title of the piece, you can read an interesting New York Times column about Brandon Garrett’s empirical analysis of 200 wrongful convictions.

Study of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA, by Adam Liptak

The study in question is called Judging Innocence, but we have to wait until January to [...]

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Audio: Law and ethics of brain scans

The law faculty of Arizona State University hosted a conference on the topic of neuroethics and neurolaw, and kindly uploaded audio of the speaker’s presentations. Most are accompanied by PowerPoint presentations you can download as PDFs.
These two give particularly good overviews:

Emily Murphy, Authenticity, Bluffing, and the Privacy of Human Thought: Ethical Issues in Brain Scanning
Gary [...]

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Moral intuitions about breach of contract

Here’s an article, just uploaded to SSRN, that I can’t resist promoting because it’s about moral intuitions and the law.
From the introduction:
In this research, we use traditional psychological methodologies to ask when laypeople consider breach to be immoral , which moral principles and moral heuristics they employ to make that judgment, and to what [...]

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Science and the insanity defence

Brian Doherty has written an excellent piece for Reason in which he claims we don’t need neuroscience to buttress insanity defenses because “old-fashioned” evidence does just fine. He concludes:
Even in the 21st century, our ability to make those kinds of legal and moral judgments remains largely untouched by purely objective science. To make the judgments [...]

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