Law Viewed Through the Lens of Neurointerventions

Abstract

The development of modern diagnostic neuroimaging techniques led to discoveries about the human brain and mind that helped give rise to the field of neurolaw. This new interdisciplinary field has led analytic jurisprudence and philosophy of law in novel directions by providing an empirically informed platform from which scholars have reassessed topics such as mental privacy and self-determination, responsibility and its relationship to mental disorders, and the proper aims of criminal law. Similarly, the development of neurointervention techniques that promise to deliver new ways of altering people’s minds (by intervening in their brains) creates opportunities and challenges that raise important and rich conceptual, moral, jurisprudential, and scientific questions, and help us to tease apart analytic jurisprudence from synthetic jurisprudence. This volume advances the field of neurolaw by investigating issues raised by the development and use of neurointerventions (actual, proposed, and potential) to regulate human mental capacity, and those raised by the law’s regulation of the use of neurointerventions.