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.  

Read more.... http://lawlab.org/law-lab/#




Conference News



MORAL BIOLOGY?

What (if anything) can the mind sciences and evolutionary biology tell us about law and morality?
Harvard Law School
April 15-16, 2010
This conference brought together academics from law, economics, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy to explore this question.  Participants focused on 5 particular issues - 
Responsibility and Judgement
Punishment
Addiction/Intervention Paradigm
Biology and Cooperation
Racism

The conference was held at  the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

For a full participant list and agenda (pdf)
 
Home_files/132%20Moral%20Biology.pdfHome_files/132%20Moral%20Biology.pdfshapeimage_6_link_0shapeimage_6_link_1