Are the cognitive sciences relevant for law? How do they influence legal theory and practice? Should lawyers become part-time cognitive scientists? The recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of human decision-making and behavior. Many claim, for instance, that we can no longer view ourselves as purely rational agents equipped with free will. This change is vitally important for lawyers, who are forced to rethink the foundations of their theories and the framework of legal practice. Featuring multidisciplinary scholars from around the world, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of law and the cognitive sciences. It develops new theories and provides often provocative insights into the relationship between the cognitive sciences and various dimensions of the law including legal philosophy and methodology, doctrinal issues, and evidence.

John Mikhail explores whether moral psychology is usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar.

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

Discusses the excusing nature of traditional and non-traditional criminal law defenses and questions the structure of these based on scientific findings.

This book’s basic hypothesis – which it proposes to test with a cognitive-sociological approach – is that legal behavior, like every form of human behavior, is directed and framed by biosocial constraints that are neither entirely genetic nor exclusively cultural. As such, from a sociological perspective the law can be seen as a super-meme, that is, as a biosocial constraint that develops only in complex societies. This super-meme theory, by highlighting a fundamental distinction between defensive and assertive biases, might explain the false contradiction between law as a static and historical phenomenon, and law as a dynamic and promotional element. Socio-legal scholars today have to face the challenge of pursuing a truly interdisciplinary approach, connecting all the fields that can contribute to building a modern theory of normative behavior and social action. Understanding and framing concepts such as rationality, emotion, or justice can help to overcome the significant divide between micro and macro sociological knowledge. Social scientists who are interested in the law must be able to master the epistemological discourses of different disciplines, and to produce fruitful syntheses and bridge-operations so as to understand the legal phenomenon from each different point of view. The book adopts four perspectives: sociological, psychological, biological-evolutionary and cognitive. All of them have the potential to be mutually integrated, and constitute that general social science that provides common ground for exchange. The goal is to arrive at a broad and integrated view of the socio-legal phenomenon, paving the way for a comprehensive theory of norm-oriented and norm-perceived actions.

The book “Paradigm Shift for Future Tennis” starts with revelations that make obvious the limitations of today’s tennis, which does not use the laws of modern Biomechanics and Neurophysiology. The second part of the book includes a new approach to the quantum mind of a champion. It will reveal the secret weapon of Roger Federer and the blueprint of a future tennis champion. This book will expose the new tennis shot emerging from the field of sports science. It is a real weapon, which can generate a ball-speed similar to that of the first serve: the Power High-Forehand. Its aim is to generate maximal possible racket-head speed while players do not wait for the ball to bounce. This is both a tactical and psychological basis for the future tennis game. This aggressive interceptive psychology will shape the minds of future tennis champions. High racket-head speed can be achieved using the stretch-reflex, without big loops and swings. Weapons of a future tennis game will comprise of whip-like tennis serves and ground strokes, based on the stretch–reflex, and using the whole body in a fluid and integrated manner, thus manifesting a superb combination of speed and strength. Restructure your brain and apply the power of state of the art biomechanical, mathematical, medical, neural, cognitive, and quantum computational intelligence to understand the tennis of today and the future!

Research and theorizing on criminal decision making has not kept pace with recent developments in other fields of human decision making. Whereas criminal decision making theory is still largely dominated by cognitive approaches such as rational choice-based models, psychologists, behavioral economists and neuroscientists have found affect (i.e., emotions, moods) and visceral factors such as sexual arousal and drug craving, to play a fundamental role in human decision processes. This book examines alternative approaches to incorporating affect into criminal decision making and testing its influence on such decisions. In so doing it generalizes extant cognitive theories of criminal decision making by incorporating affect into the decision process. In two conceptual and ten empirical chapters it is carefully argued how affect influences criminal decisions alongside rational and cognitive considerations. The empirical studies use a wide variety of methods ranging from interviews and observations to experimental approaches and questionnaires, and treat crimes as diverse as street robbery, pilfering, and sex offences. It will be of interest to criminologists, social psychologists, judgment and decision making researchers, behavioral economists and sociologists alike.

This book addresses the conceptual and evidentiary issues relating to the treatment of propaganda in international criminal law. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of scholars, researchers and legal practitioners from Africa, Australia, Europe and the United States, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the nature, position and role of the concept of propaganda in mass atrocity crimes trials. A sequel to the earlier Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law: From Speakers’ Corner to War Crimes (Routledge, 2011) this book is the first to synthesize the knowledge, procedures and methods of international criminal law with the social cognitive sciences. Including a comprehensive overview of the most relevant case law, jurisprudence and scientific studies, the book also offers a series of practical insights and strategies for both academics and legal professionals. An invaluable resource for those working in the area of international criminal law, this book will also be of interest to academics, practitioners and students with relevant interests in legal theory, politics, linguistics and psychology.

This innovative edited collection uncovers the invisible frames which form our understanding of international law. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates how social cognition and knowledge production processes affect decision-making, and inform unquestioned beliefs about what international law is, and how it works.

How do lawyers think? Brożek presents a new perspective on legal thinking as an interplay between intuition, imagination and language.