Cognitive Legal Humanities: An Introduction

Abstract

Whereas cognitive legal studies has attracted a considerable amount of attention from law professors over the past few decades, cognitive legal humanities (CLH) is only starting to gain traction. CLH brings together work in the cognitive sciences, the humanities, and law, focusing not so much on the prescriptive concerns that often animate research in cognitive legal studies, but on ways of enriching that vein of work—and legal scholarship more generally—by bringing the methods and materials of the humanities to bear on questions involving intention, consciousness, perception, memory, reasoning, attention, and emotion in relation to legal issues. In this introduction, we make three points about the importance of bringing the humanities into this discussion. First, the humanities can provide a vital means of historicizing cognition and its relations to law, while also prompting us to reflect on the differences among various ways of historicizing these matters. Second, the humanities offer resources for engaging with the politics of cognition and its relations to law—resources that are only rarely on display in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and the legal scholarship that builds on them. Third, the humanities highlight the constitutive links among cognition, law, and culture, again in ways that these other fields rarely explore. After addressing these points and showing how the articles in this issue engage with them, we offer a brief summary of each article.