Welcome to the Gruter Institute

ADVANCING INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND TEACHING IN LAW AND THE BIOLOGICALLY INFORMED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research brings together a multidisciplinary network of distinguished scholars from the United States and abroad to pursue interdisciplinary research and teaching in law and the biologically informed behavioral sciences.

The scholars and scientists associated with the Institute see a need for the law and other social sciences to be informed about the biological bases of human behavior, in addition to understanding information from the traditional social sciences. To this end, education and communication among law professors, judges, economists, scholars from numerous other social sciences, and behavioral biologists are a primary aim of the Institute. Workshops, symposia, conferences, and interdisciplinary working teams continue to be organized to carry out the goals of the Institute. Results of these efforts are disseminated in written form in scholarly journals, books, and in special publications of the Institute.

 

Gruter Institute continues participation MacArthur Foundation Grant on Law and Neuroscience

The Gruter Institute is delighted to participate in a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation aimed at integrating new developments in neuroscience into the U.S. legal system. The Gruter Institute has been working together with a distinguished and interdisciplinary group of scientists, legal scholars, jurists, and philosophers from across the country on this Project, and is responsible for leading the education and outreach work under the grant, overseeing numerous yearly conferences aimed at educating state and federal judges and others in the legal arena about neuroscientific findings relevant to the law. The Project is supported by an initial, three-year $10 million grant for the MacArthur Foundation awarded in 2007.

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The Law Lab

The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research is a partner in a new, innovative project to be housed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  The Law Lab is a multidisciplinary research initiative and collaborative network of University, nonprofit and industry partners. Its mission is to investigate and harness the varied forces — evolutionary, social, psychological, neurological and economic — that shape the role of law and social norms as they enable cooperation, governance and entrepreneurial innovation. Through open observational and experimental web-based platforms and open source software, the Law Lab will develop new digital institutions to foster innovation and research tools to deepen our understanding of trust, transparency and human cooperation. We will bring a laboratory approach to legal scholarship and social science research, and build a body of knowledge, expertise and software technologies that will fundamentally transform law and entrepreneurial practice.  

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Board News The Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research has announced the resignation of Board Member Dr. Michael McGuire. Since joining the Board in April 1989, Dr. McGuire has been a guiding force for the research programs and interdisciplinary collaboration efforts of the Institute. Dr. McGuire was a close friend and collaborator of Gruter Institute founder, Margaret Gruter. They held many shared ideas related to the need to apply evolutionary models of human behavior and an understanding of neuroscience to the legal system, and even as a means of interpreting and forecasting social, political and economic events. Included in Dr. McGuire’s primary interests are nonhuman primate behavior and brain physiology, stemming from the idea that they can serve as models for human behavior and human disorders. He has spent considerable time abroad studying nonhuman primates in their natural settings. While less complex behaviorally, nonhuman primates generally are no less complex than humans are physiologically. Thus, they serve as excellent models for human physiology and often for behavior. Read more.... McGuire_Retires_from_Board.htmlshapeimage_6_link_0