How does Brain Matter? The Case of Dignified Mind and Law

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.