Neurolaw - History

History

Neuroscience and the law have interacted over a long history, but interest spiked in the late 1990s. After the term neurolaw was first coined by Sherrod J. Taylor in 1991, scholars from both fields began to network through presentations and dialogs. This led to an increasing pull to publish books, articles, and other literature. The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research and the Dana Foundation were the first groups to provide funding for the new interdisciplinary field. Parallel to the expansion of neurolaw, an emergence of ethics specifically regarding neuroscience was developing as well. The intersection of neurolaw and ethics was able to be better scrutinized by the initiation of the Law and Neuroscience Project in 2007. The MacArthur Foundation launched Phase I of its project through a $10 million grant in hope of integrating the two fields. The initiative sustained forty projects addressing a multitude of issues, including experimental and theoretical data that will provide further evidence as to how neuroscience may eventually shape the law. This new field of study has also piqued the interests of several universities. Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law’s research seeks to research, educate, and make policy change. The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society began in July 2009, and is working towards confronting the social, legal, and ethical inferences of neuroscience.

Read more about this topic:  Neurolaw

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

    No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.
    Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)