Originally published April 22 2005
Lawmakers must study biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology if they are to craft good laws, according to scholars
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Scholars from Yale and Vanderbilt Universities do not think that laws are properly designed when they consider people as blank slates that are filled with culture and culture alone. Instead, these scholars argue that lawmakers should take into account such sciences as biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology to create laws that are effective. Most laws are created with the idea that people are purely rational actors, but lawbreakers show that this is not true in every case. Thus, according to these scholars, laws, punishments, and programs should be examined scientifically in order to determine which ones are effective and why they work.
Laws and public policy will often miss their mark until they incorporate an understanding of why, biologically, humans behave as they do, scholars from Vanderbilt and Yale universities argue in the March issue of Columbia Law Review.
"The legal system tends to assume that either people are purely rational actors or that their brains are blank slates on which culture and only culture is written.
The reality is much more complicated and can only be appreciated with a deeper understanding of behavioral biology," said Vanderbilt law professor and biologist Owen Jones.
All laws at their foundation are designed to influence human behavior, from how we interact with one another, to how we relate to our own property and that of others, to how government agencies interact with each other and with citizens, Jones said.
When developing laws, legislators and legal scholars have traditionally relied heavily on the social sciences, such as economics, psychology and political science, often responding to the popular or political trends of their time.
In the article, Jones and Goldsmith explore how an understanding of current behavioral biology research could improve the effectiveness of laws by -- among other things -- identifying behavior patterns that would be useful to understand when developing laws; revealing conflicts that exist between innate human behavior and public policy written to regulate that behavior; improving the cost-benefit analyses that are often used in developing laws; exposing unwarranted assumptions; assessing the effectiveness of legal strategies; and outlining deep patterns in the legal architecture.
Jones and Goldsmith's publication in the Columbia Law Review indicates that the field of law and behavioral biology has momentum in legal scholarship.
To encourage scholarship and research in this area, Jones founded the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law in 1997 to promote the integration of law and the life and social sciences and to help improve behavioral models relevant to law.
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