Cambridge Medical Law Society lecture: 'Neuroscience, memory, and the law'

Speaker: Professor Michael D Kopelman, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychiatry, King’s College London.

Professor Kopelman will be discussing criminal medico-legal practice, and how this is fraught with issues relating to neuroscience and memory, and even to notions of free will.

These include:

1. the concept of ‘automatism’ and the science of agency
2. amnesia for offences, commonly claimed in homicide and other violent offences
3. how false memories arise in the law courts (e.g., in false confessions) and
4. the impact of brain pathology upon medico-legal issues

More recently, a burgeoning literature has focused attention upon subtle (or not-so-subtle) neurobiological anomalies which might influence the tendency to offend. Even in patients with definite neuropsychiatric disorders, there are unresolved issues, such as:

1. the status of ‘automatism’
2. the cut-off for where pathology affects criminal responsibility or fitness to plead
3. the detection of exaggeration or simulation and
4. how the courts themselves handle people with neuropsychiatric disorders

Professor Kopelman will argue that a strongly reductionist approach can result in the neglect of important social factors, and will emphasise the great difficulty in defining thresholds (cut-offs) for where disease affects responsibility – a grey area in a world of legal black-and-whites.

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