The intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. 

1. “My brain made me do it” as a criminal defense. Tends to backfire, as juries don’t want to release people into society who claim they can’t control their violent tendencies. 

2. Lie detection via neuroimaging. Current methods are not high-resolution enough to make this useful, even if you could be certain that a lie looked the same in everyone’s brain. (Besides which, eyewitnesses often sincerely believe something that isn’t true.) However, we can get basic data about people’s subjective responses to what they see, which has some degree of connection to behaviour, and we can tell to some degree what they are looking at.

3. The neurocompatibility of legal systems: to what extent does the legal system understand mental illness? Rehabilitation? Individual differences? Conflict resolution? The way the system is set up focuses on criminal law, but most people are more concerned with family, employment and community issues, which are very different in terms of how the problems get resolved. 

4. Can we decrease bias in the legal system? What distorts jurors’ ability to make good judgments? Are there ways of instructing jurors to decrease their bias against people who they see as unlike them?

5. Courtroom design: natural light, calm colours, the judge not elevated – this can lead to less escalation of conflict. (But not usually a budget priority.)

6. What legal protections exist for freedom of thought or mental privacy? Currently, the technology can’t realistically “read” thoughts, and a suspect can’t be forced into a position of involuntarily confessing, but if these things exist in future, we need corresponding legal protections. 

7. Will there be better ways in future to evaluate things like fitness to testify or fitness to be a custodial parent? 

8. It’s probably only a matter of time before portable, real-time language decoders are widespread (able to read the activation of your language centres and pick up your unspoken thoughts). The convenience factor of these will mean that people will trade privacy for that convenience. Prototype is at least 10 years away (and it may turn out not to be possible at all). Could also read nonverbal feelings that we don’t necessarily have conscious access to. Will all of this become evidence in court?

9. There is work going on about inserting memories into the brain as well as extracting things. It would be invasive, and harder to achieve than reading them, and potentially physically dangerous. However, there are other (non-mechanical) ways to implant false memories. 

10. It’s potentially possible to determine whether someone is actually feeling the pain they claim; it’s also potentially possible to assess their susceptibility to addiction. 

11. Neurological studies have been done on how judges make their decisions. There are arguments for using machine judges instead for some applications (such as dispute resolution), to decrease bias. 

12. Prediction and profiling may be possible using neurological methods. This includes determining how likely a convicted criminal is to reoffend, or determining who is a psychopath. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaTbISZPlMQ&feature=share