Gruter Institute Conferences
A full list of conferences is available through the following link:
Since its founding, the Gruter Institute has conducted cores of conferences, seminars, panels, workshops and symposia. Topics have included: Neurobiology, Human Behavior, and Law; Law, Biology, and the Sense of Justice; Human Rights; Evolutionary Biology and Business; The Relevance of Ethology for Environmental Law; The Rule of Law, Human Nature and the New Russia; Ostracism; Sex and Reason and Investigating the Basis of Property. In putting on sessions, the Institute has partnered with universities such as UC Berkeley, Cambridge, Dartmouth, George Mason, Georgetown, Georgia State, Harvard, the London School of Economics, Munich, Tübingen, Santa Clara, Stanford and UCLA and with organizations including the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the Mercatus Center, and the Brookings Institution. Leading specialists in myriad fields have presented recent research. The proceedings of many conferences have been published.
Teaching Seminars on Law and Biology
Numerous Gruter Institute programs have helped to educate legal scholars, lawyers and judges about the insights of biology into human behavior. The Institute has conducted several faculty-training seminars directed primarily to law professors and lawyers. They support the development of law faculty to teach scientifically accurate courses, and to conduct research and writing, on law and behavioral biology. Partly as a result of this educational outreach, in 1998 a group of legal academics formed the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL), an independent professional organization with annual meetings and a growing membership.
The Gruter Institute has partnered with the Federal Judicial Center in organizing four-day courses on Law, Human Nature, and Biology for federal judges, co-sponsored by Dartmouth College and Vermont Law School . The Institute also aims similar courses at state judges, in collaboration with the National Judicial College .
Law School Courses
To encourage teaching about the links of evolutionary biology and ethology with the law, the Gruter Institute has assisted in the planning of courses at various law schools. Many Research Fellows of the Institute have introduced seminars on law and behavioral biology at their universities, for example: E. Donald Elliott and Roger Masters at Yale Law School; William Rodgers, Jr. at University of Washington Law School; Owen Jones at Vanderbilt University Law School and Arizona State University College of Law; Ray Coletta at McGeorge School of Law, David Herring and Lawrence Frolik at University of Pittsburgh Law School; Oliver Goodenough at Vermont Law School; Mark Grady at George Mason University and Michael McGuire at UCLA Law School; Wolfgang Fikentscher at University of Munich School of Law; and Manfred Rehbinder at University of Zürich. The Institute actively supports the introduction of such seminars in other law schools both in the United States and in Europe .
Professional Meetings
The Gruter Institute has helped to organize sessions at renowned professional meetings, in which biological perspectives are integrated with diverse disciplines. Examples of such meetings include sessions at the American Anthropological Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the American Political Science Association, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL).