Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POL2098: What is Law? Jurisprudence from Stone Tablet to Brain Imaging

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Basic reading:

Lon Fuller's “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Moses, Exodus 19-24

L.W. King “Code of Hammurabi”

Wing-Tsit Chan “The Natural Way of Lao Tzu”

Benjamin Hoff “The Tao of Pooh”

Ernest Weinrib (1988) “Legal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of Law”

Karl Llewellyn “A Realistic Jurisprudence – The Next Step”

H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law

Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire

Daniel Dennett Freedom Evolves, Chapters 1 & 2

Jeffery Rosen, “The Brain on the Stand” NY Times

Micheal Gazzaniga and Megan Steven, “Free Will in the 21st Century”

Jonathan Fugelsang and Keven Dunbar “A cognitive neuroscience framework for the understanding of causal reasoning and the law”

Eyal Aharoni et al. (2013) “Neuroprediction of future rearrest”

Iris Vilaresa et al. (2017) Predicting the knowledge–recklessness distinction in the human brain

Morris Hoffman “The neuroeconomic path of the law”

Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything”

Stephen Morse, “New Neuroscience, Old Problems”

Patricia Smith Churchland “A review of The Ethical Brain by Michael Gazzaniga”

Patricia Smith Churchland “Moral Decision-Making and the Brain”

Oliver Goodenough and Kristin Prehn “A neuroscientific approach to normative judgment in law and justice”

Oliver Goodenough “Responsibility and punishment: whose mind? A response”