Project on Law and Mind Sciences

The Situationist blog, established by Professor Jon Hanson and run by the Project on Law and Mind Science at Harvard Law School, recently received the 2011 Media Prize awarded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

This year’s “HLS Thinks Big” event, inspired by the global TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) talks and modeled after the College’s “Harvard Thinks Big” event first held last year, took place on May 23, featuring topics ranging from legal assistance for undocumented students to risk analysis in constitutional design.

Professor Jon Hanson, the Alfred Smart Professor of Law, is this year's winner of the prestigious Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence, an honor bestowed each spring by the Harvard Law School graduating class. The award recognizes teaching ability, attentiveness to student concerns and general contributions to student life at the law school.

A conference last month at HLS, “The Psychology of Inequality,” presented by the Project on Law & Mind Sciences (PLMS), brought together scholars, law students, and others to examine inequality from the standpoint of the latest research in social science, health science, and mind science, and to reflect on the implications of their findings for law.

In a recent interview on the website Big Think, Jon Hanson, the Alfred Smart Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Director of The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School, delves into an exploration of psychology, ideology and law.

HLS Professor Jon Hanson and Adam Benforado ’05 wrote the following op-ed “Right or left, judges are activists” that appeared in the May 20 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Benforado is an assistant professor of law at Drexel University's Earle Mack School of Law and Hanson is director of The Project of Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.

On Saturday, March 7, Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Mind Sciences held its third annual conference, “The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology and Consequences.”

Individual free choice, an idea that permeates common sense and legal theory, assumes that actions reflect the stable preferences of individual actors. Individuals are responsible for their actions (that is, their preference-driven choices), and laws can therefore be designed on that assumption.