Owen Jones
Owen Jones, who joined Vanderbilt’s law and biology faculties in 2004, teaches Law and Neuroscience and Law, Biology and Human Behavior, and is affiliated with the law school’s Law & Human Behavior academic program. Professor Jones was recently named co-director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Decisionmaking, which integrates the efforts of scholars at approximately two dozen universities to explore the potential relevance of neuroscience to criminal law.In this essay, Professor Jones discusses the essential connections between the study of law and the study of biology.
Law needs biology. And not just to turn crime-scene eyelashes into convictions, or to assess how new toxins will affect ecosystems. Law needs biology because it has an unending need for improved efficiency and effectiveness.
Here’s why. At its broadest, each legal system provides tools for changing the environment a population encounters in ways intended to inspire more of the behaviors society wants, and less of the behaviors it doesn’t. In shaping these tools, law depends heavily on behavioral models offered up by other disciplines – those insights that suggest to us that if we change law in this way, people will respond in that way (and not some unintended and costly third way).
Most of the past insights into human behavior have come from disciplines like economics, political science, sociology, and traditional psychology. These social science perspectives have proved remarkably helpful. But it is increasingly clear that behavior does not come pre-packaged by discipline. Because biology includes a vast wealth of information about behavior generally, law may therefore benefit from considering insights from the life sciences, as well as information from the social sciences. For example, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, behavioral genetics, behavioral ecology, and neuroeconomics, among many others, are all helping us gain a deeper understanding of how the human brain makes decisions, and a deeper appreciation of how, when, and why humans behave in myriad ways relevant to law.
Of course, no one is suggesting that biological influences are somehow more important than cultural and environmental ones. In fact it would be incoherent to think so. (And biologists don’t.) Biologists essentially study various areas of the overall design space in which genetic and environmental influences meet. It is the interaction of the two that lays foundations for behavior. While this suggests that genetic determinism is generally a silly idea, it reciprocally suggests that environmental determinism – the idea that virtually all behavior arises exclusively through environmental and cultural pathways -- is equally incomplete.
In a recent article, for example, Tim Goldsmith and I illustrated how behavioral biology can, among other things, help law to: discover useful patterns in regulable behavior; uncover conflicts among contemporaneously pursued legal policies; sharpen the cost-benefit analyses that often influence legal policymaking; clarify links between various causal influences and their effects on human behavior; increase our understanding about human decision-making; provide theoretical foundation for, and potential predictive power about, a variety of human behaviors; disentangle the multiple causes of various law-relevant behaviors; expose a variety of unwarranted assumptions underlying legal approaches for inspiring behavioral changes; assess the comparative effectiveness of legal strategies we employ to change specific behaviors; reveal deep patterns in legal architecture; and identify under-noticed and unintended selection pressures that legal systems can themselves create.
This is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. For example, new technologies in neuroscience now enable us to peer into the brain non-invasively, and observe it at work. No one yet knows where this new capability will lead. But it seems likely that – as is so often the case – new capabilities will bring not only new knowledge, but new questions. Which in turn ensures that issues in law and behavioral biology will continue to inspire and challenge us for some time.
To be clear, the claim is not that behavioral biology should occupy a dominant position among the panoply of law-relevant disciplines. The claim is necessarily more modest: behavioral biology provides one important component of many necessary to any firm foundation for understanding how and why humans behave. The better that foundation, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools.
For more on this subject, see Owen D. Jones & Timothy H. Goldsmith, "Law and Behavioral Biology,” in the Columbia Law Review.
