Pain is at the heart of legal areas from tort to torture, and yet legal decision-makers may be relying on scientifically outmoded concepts of pain and its effects. This Symposium brought together legal and medical experts to discuss:

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• Recent scientific breakthroughs in the understanding of pain, including long-term neurological changes
• The complicated relationship between pain and emotion, and how studying how physical and emotional pain are represented in the brain can help us understand their similarities and differences
• How updated understanding of the neuroscience of pain can help improve legal outcomes—and where the limits are

The conversation, presented by the CLBB Pain & Suffering working group, with support from the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, was facilitated by Judy Foreman, an investigative journalist and author of A Nation In Pain: Healing Our Country’s Greatest Health Problem. Continue reading »

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On Thursday, January 22, 2015, CLBB Senior Fellow in Law & Applied Neuroscience Amanda Pustilnik presented the Psychiatry Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Pustilnik reviewed her research at the intersection of pain and the law in a talk titled “Imaging Brains, Changing Minds: How Pain Neuroimaging Can Help Transform the Law.” Continue reading »

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On Thursday, February 12, 2015, guest speaker Professor Stephen J. Morse, JD, PhD, former MacArthur Foundation Law & Neuroscience Project co-Chair and co-Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society and CLBB Faculty members Judge Nancy A. Gertner and Professor Amanda C. Pustilnik participated in a lunchtime conversation about how – or whether – new knowledge about the brain is changing legal concepts of agency and responsibility.

The event was at Wasserstein Hall, at Harvard Law School. Continue reading »

On Wednesday, October 1, Amanda Pustilnik presented on juvenile developmental neuroscience research and it’s implications for law. The talk took place at the University of Arizona Law School as part of “The Mind & The Law” public lecture series.

The talk was titled “And If Your Friends Jumped Off a Bridge, Would You Do It? Translating Juvenile Developmental Neuroscience into Law.” Here is the talk abstract: Continue reading »

Amanda Pustilnik, JD

I am excited to join CLBB as the first Senior Fellow in Law & Applied Neuroscience. This fellowship is the product of an innovative partnership between CLBB and the Petrie-Flom Center of Harvard Law School. This partnership aims to translate developments in neuroscience into legal applications, remaining sensitive to the normative dimensions of many – if not all – legal questions. The field of law & neuroscience is large and growing, addressing questions that intersect with nearly every area of law and a huge range of social and human concerns. CLBB is bringing together scientists, bioethicists, and legal scholars to look at questions ranging from criminal responsibility and addiction, to mind-reading and brain-based lie detection, to how the brain’s changes over our life course affect our capacities to make decisions. Continue reading »