Teneille R. Brown

Brain Images as Legal Evidence

This paper explores whether brain images may be admitted as evidence in criminal trials under Federal Rule of Evidence 403, which weighs probative value against the danger of being prejudicial, confusing, or misleading to fact finders. The paper summarizes and evaluates recent empirical research relevant to these issues. We argue that currently the probative value of neuroimages for criminal responsibility is minimal, and there is some evidence of their potential to be prejudicial or misleading. We also propose experiments that will directly assess how jurors are influenced by brain images.

When scientific data become legal evidence.

In the 9 January issue, the News of the Week story “Brain scans of pain raise questions for the law” (G. Miller, p. [195][1]) and the Books review “Grappling with the gulf” (D. Greenbaum and M. Gerstein, p. [210][2]) highlight an important misunderstanding between lawyers and scientists

Law, Neuroscience and Conceptual Housecleaning

On occasion, my own scholarship in law and neuroscience has required me to wade into philosophical waters. However, given that I am not a trained philosopher, I have always tried to focus more on practical legal problems, as opposed to engaging directly with the philosophy of mind. This explains why I thoroughly enjoyed reading Minds, Brains and Law by Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson; it provided me with an exquisitely clear window into a field that had otherwise been somewhat opaque. The basic language and examples resist the temptation of other philosophers of mind, who generally appear to enjoy alienating outsiders (and shredding each other) by relying on recycled but ill-defined thought experiments. This book accomplishes much by fixing on the shield rather than the sword, and by not speaking to such an insular audience. The irony of course, is thatMinds, Brains, and Law attempts to debunk a series of cognitive biases within the scholarship of the developing field of law and neuroscience – a field that seems it should be uniquely situated to expose rather than exacerbate such biases. But perhaps this just goes to illustrate how incredibly pervasive, almost inescapable, these biases are. The authors successfully take on a handful of such fallacies and biases. The one chiefly in their crosshairs, and perhaps the most controversial, has been dubbed the ‘mereological fallacy’, or the problem of

Review of Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will

Introduction: New Approaches to Knotty Old Problems 1. Avoiding Cartesian Materialism 2. From Causal Reductionism to Self-Directed Systems 3. From Mindless to Intelligent Action 4. How Can Neural Nets Mean? 5. How Does Reason Get Its Grip on the Brain? 6. Whos Responsible? 7. Neurobiological Reductionism and Free Will Postscript