The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has given $10 million to establish a new national program on the law and neuroscience that will be based at UC Santa Barbara and involve two dozen leading universities across the country.

The effort will seek to integrate new developments in neuroscience into the U.S. legal system. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is the honorary chair of the Law and Neuroscience Project, which will be directed by Michael S. Gazzaniga, UCSB professor of psychology and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.

“Neuroscientific evidence has already been used to persuade jurors in sentencing decisions, and courts have admitted brain-imaging evidence during criminal trials to support pleas of insanity,” said Gazzaniga in explaining the rationale behind the grant. “Without a solid, mutual understanding of each others’ fields, lawyers and judges cannot respond in an informed way to developments in neuroscience, and scientists cannot properly advise lawyers or recognize the legal relevance of their current and future research.”

In addition to being overall director, he also is principal investigator of the Law and Neuroscience Project (LNP). Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College, co-directs the project.

“We are thankful that through this visionary program, the MacArthur Foundation will provide critical new support for a pioneering area of research that has tremendous potential to improve our society as well as the lives of individuals,” said Chancellor Henry T. Yang.

The MacArthur Foundation’s announcement of the three-year grant said the new program brings together “a distinguished group of scientists, legal scholars, jurists, and philosophers from across the country to help integrate new developments in neuroscience into the U.S. legal system.”

The LNP is the first systematic effort to bridge the fields of law and science in considering how courts should deal with new brain-scanning techniques. “Neuroscience could have an impact on the legal system that is as dramatic as DNA testing,” MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton said.

Three working groups of scholars and legal experts will address the topics of addiction, brain abnormalities, and decision-making as they relate to complex issues such as criminal responsibility. Each group will be directed by a neuroscientist and a legal expert, and include up to 15 neuroscientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and legal system professionals, including a judge.

Proponents of neuroscientific evidence say it can help make the judicial system more accurate and less biased on matters of guilt, punishment, and treatment, on the detection of lies and bias, and in the prediction of criminal behavior. They believe the result could be less crime and fewer people in prisons.

Skeptics fear that brain-imaging technology poses a threat to privacy and notions of personal responsibility. Both scientists and legal scholars warn that failing to properly integrate neuroscience and law could harm the legal system by sending the wrong people to prison, and by creating skepticism about some of the law’s basic assumptions.

Additional information is available on the project’s Web site at <www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org>.