Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion in the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl St. to kickoff the MacArthur Foundation's $10M grant to support research at the intersection of law and neuroscience. This project has been in the works for some time, but it was just made public yesterday. The project will focus on criminal law issues, with three areas of focus: (1) "diminished brains and the law," (2) "decision making and the law," and (3) "addiction, neuroscience, and criminal justice policy." The topics are clearly of interest to a broad audience. Author Tom Wolfe (who happens to hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale) was in the audience and asked panelists a question about free will.
All of this is clearly big news for the field. Interestingly, some of the funds from MacArthur are expected to support actual experiments and not just papers about conceptual, ethical, and legal issues related to the neurosciences. Here's a link to the project's main website.
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