Abstract
What does the brain mean in a legal domain and how the integration of
neuroscience and law goes beyond the practical difficulties highlighted
by the social scientists and legal theorists? On the one hand, the legal
theorists took it as a conceptual error and on the other hand, advocates
of neurosciences took it as a promising emerging field of integration.
Some scholars took an alternative route considering it as a fascinating
element of scientific discourse. The present article aims to show that
the coming of “brain language” in comparison to the other forensic
languages in the everyday legal discourse is not going to become a
reality, as truth inferred through the everyday experiences and the
interpretations of scientific knowledge by the judges. Scientific
knowledge through the mapping of active brain area by the available
brain visualising techniques shows the correlation between brain and
behaviour and not the causation. So its use in the legal domain seems
less institutionalised, showing the determinism of the brain as less
authentic in itself when compared with the intuitive path embedded in
the culture and history.