Law and Magic Blog

Can Big Brother Read Your Mind?

On Talk of the Nation Science Friday May 14, the law and science of lie detection and mind reading through MRI scans. A scan of the literature reveals that scholars have writing in this area for several years now. Here's a short bibliography.

Bhatt, Meghana, and Colin Camerer, Self-Referential Thinking and Equilibrium as States of Mind in Games: Fmri Evidence, 52 Games and Economic Behavior 424-459 (August 2005).

Feigenson, Neil, Brain Imaging and Courtroom Evidence: On the Admissibility and Persuasiveness of fMRI, 2 International Journal of Law in Context 233-255 (2006).

Fox, Dov, Brain Imaging and the Bill of Rights: Memory Detection Technologies and U.S. Criminal Justice, 8 American Journal of Bioethics 1-4 (2008). 

 

Kerr, Ian R., Cynthia Aoki, and Max Binnie, Tessling on My Brain: The Future of Lie Detection and Brain Privacy in the Criminal Justice System, 50 (8) Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice  (June 2008).

 

Law, Jonathan R. H., Cherry-Picking Memories: fMRI-Based Lie Detection in the U.S. Courts. 

Lowenberg, Kelly, Deceptive Forensics: The Reliability of Forensic fMRI Lie Detection Tests.

Marks, Jonathan H., Interrogational Neuroimaging in Counterterrorism: A No-Brainer or a Human Rights Hazard? 33 American Journal of Law and Medicine 483-500 (2007). 

Moriarty, Jane Campbell, Visions of Deception: Neuroimages and the Search for Truth, 42 Akron Law Review 739 (2009). 

Thompson, Sean Kevin, The Legality of the Use of Psychiatric Neuroimaging in Intelligence Interrogation, 90 Cornell 1601 (2005).  
 

So, is it possible for law enforcement to read a suspect's mind? Is the plot of "Minority Report" coming true--with technology?

 

Statistics, Science, and Sloppy Thinking

This article doesn't exactly focus on magical thinking, but it does emphasize the importance of a good grasp of scientific and mathematic principles, especially for attorneys and judges.

Michael I. Meyerson, University of Baltimore School of Law, has written Significant Statistics: The Unwitting Policy Making of Mathematically Ignorant Judges, forthcoming in the Pepperdine Law Review for 2010. Here is the abstract.

This article will explore several areas in which judges, hampered by their mathematical ignorance, have permitted numerical analysis to subvert the goals of our legal system. In Part II, I will examine the perversion of the presumption of innocence in paternity cases, where courts make the counter-factual assumption that regardless of the evidence, prior to DNA testing, a suspect has a 50/50 chance of being the father. In Part III, I will explore the unnecessary injection of race into trials involving the statistics of DNA matching, even when race is entirely irrelevant to the particular case. Next, in Part IV, I will discuss how courts use race- and gender-based statistics to reduce damages in tort cases for women and racial minorities, and silently assert that past racism and sexism will continue. In the final section, I will examine how judges have improperly allocated the risk of error in cases such as securities fraud, so as to reward those who have attempted to manipulate stock prices illegally.

Download the article from SSRN here.