Elizabeth S. Scott

Evaluating Adolescent Decision Making in Legal Contexts

Challenges the use by policy researchers of a model for comparing adolescent and adult decision making that is based on informed consent standards. An expanded decision-making framework designed to evaluate “judgment” in adults and adolescents can better test the empirical basis of paternalistic legal policies. The theoretical and empirical literature on the informed consent framework is critiqued and an alternative framework incorporating judgment factors is proposed. Three judgment factors—temporal perspective, attitude toward risk, and peer and parental influence—and their effects on decision making are explored. Finally, implications for future research are analyzed in several decision-making contexts.

When Is an Adolescent an Adult? Assessing Cognitive Control in Emotional and Nonemotional Contexts

An individual is typically considered an adult at age 18, although the age of adulthood varies for different legal and social policies. A key question is how cognitive capacities relevant to these policies change with development. The current study used an emotional go/no-go paradigm and functional neuroimaging to assess cognitive control under sustained states of negative and positive arousal in a community sample of one hundred ten 13- to 25-year-olds from New York City and Los Angeles. The results showed diminished cognitive performance under brief and prolonged negative emotional arousal in 18- to 21-year-olds relative to adults over 21. This reduction in performance was paralleled by decreased activity in fronto-parietal circuitry, implicated in cognitive control, and increased sustained activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, involved in emotional processes. The findings suggest a developmental shift in cognitive capacity in emotional situations that coincides with dynamic changes in prefrontal circuitry. These findings may inform age-related social policies.

Justice Policy Reform for High-Risk Juveniles: Using Science to Achieve Large-Scale Crime Reduction

After a distinctly punitive era, a period of remarkable reform in juvenile crime regulation has begun. Practical urgency has fueled interest in both crime reduction and research on the prediction and malleability of criminal behavior. In this rapidly changing context, high-risk juveniles--the small proportion of the population where crime becomes concentrated--present a conundrum. Research indicates that these are precisely the individuals to treat intensively to maximize crime reduction, but there are both real and imagined barriers to doing so. Mitigation principles (during early adolescence, ages 10-13) and institutional placement or criminal court processing (during mid-late adolescence, ages 14-18) can prevent these juveniles from receiving interventions that would best protect public safety. In this review, we synthesize relevant research to help resolve this challenge in a manner that is consistent with the laws core principles. In our view, early adolescence offers unique opportunities for risk reduction that could (with modifications) be realized in the juvenile justice system in cooperation with other social institutions.

The Teenage Brain: Adolescent Brain Research and the Law

In this article, we explore the emerging and potential influence of adolescent brain science on law and public policy. The primary importance of this research is in policy domains that implicate adolescent risk taking; these include drug and alcohol use, driver licensing, and criminal justice. We describe the emerging importance of brain science in the Supreme Court and other policy arenas. Finally, we argue that current research cannot contribute usefully to legal decisions about individual adolescents and should not be used in criminal trials at the present time, except to provide general developmental information.

Sterilization of Mentally Retarded Persons: Reproductive Rights and Family Privacy

Sterilization is one of the most frequently chosen forms of contraception in the world;1 many persons who do not want to have children select this simple, safe, and effective means of avoiding unwanted pregnancy. For individuals who are mentally disabled, however, sterilization has more ominous associations. Until recently, involuntary sterilization was used as a weapon of the state in the war against mental deficiency. Under eugenic sterilization laws in effect in many states, retarded persons were routinely sterilized without their consent or knowledge. 2

Surrogacy and the Politics of Commodification

This essay examines the changing social and political meaning of surrogacy contracts over the twenty years since this issue first attracted public attention in the context of the Baby M case in the 1980s. In the protracted course of the Baby M litigation, surrogacy was effectively framed as illegitimate commodification - baby selling and the exploitation of women. This framing can be attributed to a moral panic generated by the media, politicians and a coalition of interest groups opposing surrogacy - primarily feminists and religious conservatives. The framing of surrogacy as commodification had far reaching effects on legal regulation. In the post-Baby M period, lawmakers in many states moved to prohibit or severely restrict surrogacy arrangements. In recent years, however, the framing of surrogacy as commodification has been replaced to a large extent by a more benign characterization which emphasizes the useful service provided by surrogates to childless couples. Further, over the past decade, regulators increasingly have focused on the goal of reducing uncertainty and providing procedures to efficiently establish the parental status of intended parents.This essay seeks to explain these changes. Several factors have been important: First, hostility to surrogacy has declined because the moral panic has dissipated as many of the predicted harms have not been realized. Further, advances in in vitro fertilization (IVF) have expanded the use of gestational surrogacy, which is less readily framed as commodification and thus, more palatable than traditional surrogacy. Finally, the interest group dynamic has changed: Womens groups have withdrawn, plausibly because the kinds of arguments made against surrogacy increasingly were adopted by anti-abortion advocates. These conditions have contributed to a political climate in which lawmakers have adopted a pragmatic approach, regulating with a goal of minimizing the social cost of surrogacy.

At risk of being risky: The relationship between “brain age” under emotional states and risk preference

Highlights • Multivariate-analyses significantly predict age in randomized train & test groups using pseudo-resting state data.• Emotional states affect underlying functional connectivity and lead to changes in an individual’s predicted “brain age”.• Under emotional states adolescents on average demonstrated a reduction in “brain age” from their true age (i.e., a younger brain phenotype).• On average, a phenotype of a younger “brain age” during emotional states, relative to a neutral state is related to risk preference and perception.

Areal Spread of the Effect of Cloud Seeding at the Whitetop Experiment

With reference to arguments that weather modification technology is sufficiently advanced for the federal government to finance cloud-seeding operations as a means of alleviating water shortages, an analysis of the Whitetop rain stimulation experiment was performed. The average 24-hour precipitation in six concentric regions up to 180 miles from the center of the target on 102 days of cloud seeding was less than that on the 96 experimental days without seeding. For distances less than 30 miles, the apparent loss of rain due to seeding was 32 percent. With the increase in distance, this apparent loss decreased to a minimum of 9 percent for gages between 120 and 150 miles from the center. However, the 48 gages at distances between 150 and 180 miles showed a 22 percent apparent loss of rain due to seeding. The estimated average loss of rain within the whole region of about 100,000 square miles was 21 percent of what would have fallen without seeding. When a 5-year experiment, expected to produce a 5 to 10-percent increase, shows a 20-percent decrease in rainfall, the relevant technology does not appear reliable enough for practical use.

Gender Politics and Child Custody: The Puzzling Persistence of the Best Interest Standard

The best interest of the child standard has been widely criticized by scholars for its vagueness and indeterminacy, and yet for forty years it has been the prevailing legal rule for resolving custody disputes. This article confirms the deficiencies of the standard, focusing particularly on the daunting verifiability problems courts face in evaluating claims. Yet, despite the substantial risk of erroneous or arbitrary custody decisions, the best interest standard remains firmly entrenched, with the apparent approval of policymakers and courts. We explain this puzzle as the product of two interrelated factors. First, a protracted gender war has embroiled advocates for mothers or fathers for decades, thereby creating a political economy deadlock. The main front in the gender war has been the legislative battle over joint custody, with fathers’ advocates promoting, and mothers’ groups opposing a joint custody presumption. But the struggle has also played out in the efforts of mothers’ groups to make domestic violence a key factor in custody disputes and the responsive effort by fathers’ advocates to elevate the importance of parental alienation. These efforts have brought apparent determinacy to important categories of cases and may have reduced dissatisfaction with the best interest standard but with costs that have not been recognized. Second, courts and policy makers mistakenly believe that psychologists and other mental health professionals have the expertise to obtain accurate family information and to evaluate and compare the competing claims. Courts routinely ask these professionals to guide them in making custody decisions- an unusual role for experts in legal proceedings. But mental health experts do not have the skill or knowledge to perform these functions; acting without the constraints generally applied to experts, they routinely go beyond the limits of science and of their own expertise in advising courts about custody. Their participation thus masks the deficiencies of the best interest standard and contributes to its perpetuation. Exposing the illusion that psychological experts can overcome the problems inherent in best interest determinations is an important step toward reform and better custody decisionmaking. Desirable reforms include adoption of the ALI approximation standard, restrictions on the admissibility of psychological evidence, and encouragement of private ordering for resolving most custody disputes.

Law and Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted to the President's Bioethics Commission

President Obama charged the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to identify a set of core ethical standards in the neuroscience domain, including the appropriate use of neuroscience in the criminal-justice system. The Commission, in turn, called for comments and recommendations. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience submitted a consensus statement, published here, containing 16 specific recommendations. These are organized within three main themes: 1) what steps should be taken to enhance the capacity of the criminal justice system to make sound decisions regarding the admissibility and weight of neuroscientific evidence?; 2) to what extent can the capacity of neurotechnologies to aid in the administration of criminal justice be enhanced through research?; and 3) in what additional ways might important ethical issues at the intersection of neuroscience and criminal justice be addressed?