Senior Fellow for Law & Neuroscience Amanda Pustilnik Guest Lecturing in HLS Seminar
As part of her work with the Petrie-Flom Center and Center for Law Brain and Behavior at MGH's Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience, Senior Fellow Amanda C. Pustilnik will be a regular guest lecturer in a seminar during Spring 2015 at Harvard Law School. Taught by Judge Nancy Gertner, the seminar examines cutting edge and even controversial linkages between law and neuroscience. The course seeks to highlight neuroscientific basis for behavior patterns with legal implication including how neuroscience intersects with criminal law, its normative assumptions and criminal punishment, evidentiary rules, memory bias and enhancement, lie and deception detection, adolescent brains and juvenile law. The course will look critically at efforts to use neuroimaging in court in connection with in the prediction of criminality and predispositions towards mental illness and addiction, as well as efforts to identify neurobiological influences on the brain. Is there such a thing as a criminally “violent brain”? Does it make sense to speak of the “neurobiology of violence” or the psychopathology of crime, and how are (or should) such concepts translated into criminal law. The seminar will necessarily lead to a consideration of the relationship between law and science, more generally, and neuroscience in particular. Speakers will provide insights into their work and research.
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addiction bioethics children's health criminal law health law policy mental health neuroscience