Faculty Bibliography

Smaller, more affordable, and more portable MRI brain scanners offer exciting opportunities to address unmet research needs and long-standing health inequities in remote and resource-limited international settings. Field-based neuroimaging research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) can improve local capacity to conduct both structural and functional neuroscience studies, expand knowledge of brain injury and neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders, and ultimately improve the timeliness and quality of clinical diagnosis and treatment around the globe. Facilitating MRI research in remote settings can also diversify reference databases in neuroscience, improve understanding of brain development and degeneration across the lifespan in diverse populations, and help to create reliable measurements of infant and child development. These deeper understandings can lead to new strategies for collaborating with communities to mitigate and hopefully overcome challenges that negatively impact brain development and quality of life. Despite the potential importance of research using highly portable MRI in remote and resource-limited settings, there is little analysis of the attendant ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI). To begin addressing this gap, this paper presents findings from the first phase of an envisioned multi-staged and iterative approach for creating ethical and legal guidance in a complex global landscape. Section 1 provides a brief introduction to the emerging technology for field-based MRI research. Section 2 presents our methodology for generating plausible use cases for MRI research in remote and resource-limited settings and identifying associated ELSI issues. Section 3 analyzes core ELSI issues in designing and conducting field-based MRI research in remote, resource-limited settings and offers recommendations. We argue that a guiding principle for field-based MRI research in these contexts should be including local communities and research participants throughout the research process in order to create sustained local value. Section 4 presents a recommended path for the next phase of work that could further adapt these use cases, address ethical and legal issues, and co-develop guidance in partnership with local communities.

The implications for law of new neuroscientific techniques and findings are now among the hottest topics in legal, academic, and media venues. Law and Neuroscience--a collaboration of professors in law, neuroscience, and biology--is the first and still only coursebook to chart this new territory, providing the world's most comprehensive collection of neurolaw materials. This text will be of interest to many professors teaching Criminal Law and Torts courses, who would like to incorporate the most current thinking on how biology intersects with the law.

America's judiciary is aging. The average age of federal judges is sixty-nine years old, older than it has been at any other time in the country's history. The typical reaction to this demographic shift is concern that aging judges will serve past their prime. Scholars have thus offered proposals for mandatory judicial retirement, judicial term limits, and mechanisms for judicial removal. In this Article, I critique such proposals and draw on cognitive neuroscience to argue that rather than forcing their retirement, we should empower aging judges. The central neuroscientific insight is that individual brains age differently. While at the population level, age generally leads to reductions in information processing speed, and for some, serious deficits in memory and decision-making capacity, there is much individual variation. Given individual differences in how aging effects cognitive decline, the current system--which mandates intense health scrutiny when a judge is younger, followed by no formal cognitive evaluation for the rest of the judge's career--can be improved. I argue that we can empower judges by providing them opportunities for confidential, accurate, and thorough cognitive assessments at regular intervals throughout their judicial careers. If carefully developed and implemented so as to avoid politicization and to ensure complete confidentiality of results, individualized judicial cognitive health assessments will allow judges to make more informed decisions about when and how to modify their service on the bench. More individualized assessment will allow the legal system to retain the wisdom of experienced judges, while avoiding the injustice that comes with handing over the courtroom to a judge who is no longer capable of running it.