Psychology and jurisdiction: the case of forensic neurosciences

Abstract

The progress in the field of cognitive neuroscience in the last decades has opened the way to the study of issues previously considered to be of exclusive philosophical relevance, including free will, and raised questions both on the possibility of a re-foundation on neuroscientific grounds of criminal law and about the introduction of data from cognitive neurosciences in criminal trials.
After tracing the history of the relationships between psychology and law, the article deals with the theme of the use of scientific knowledge and methods by the justice system and presents some issues of the debate on the relationship, theoretical and practical, between neuroscience and jurisprudence.