Law Commons^™

How Experts Have Dominated The Neuroscience Narrative In Criminal Cases For Twelve Decades: A Warning For The Future, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Phineas Gage, the man who survived impalement by a rod through his head in 1848, is considered “one of the great medical curiosities of all time.” While expert accounts of Gage's post-accident personality changes are often wildly damning and distorted, recent research shows that Gage mostly thrived, despite his trauma. Studying past cases such as Gage’s helps us imagine—and prepare for—a future of law and neuroscience in which scientific debates over the brain’s functions remain fiery, and experts divisively control how we characterize brain-injured defendants.

This Article examines how experts have long dominated the neuroscience narrative in U.S. criminal cases, …

Proxy Crimes And Overcriminalization, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

A solution to the problem of “overcriminalization” appears to be decriminalization of certain crimes. This Essay focuses on a group of crimes that has been labeled “proxy crimes” as a candidate to be eliminated. What are proxy crimes? Douglas Husak defines them as “offenses designed to achieve a purpose other than to prevent the conduct they explicitly proscribe.” Michael Moore describes them as involving situations where we “use one morally innocuous act as a proxy for another, morally wrongful act or mental state.” Put that way, proxy crimes seem highly problematic, and Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan bluntly put it, …