Tag: Neuro-Law

What Should the Future Look Like for Brain-Based Pain Imaging in the Law? Three Eminent Scholars Weigh In

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By Amanda C. Pustilnik, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law; Faculty Member, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, Massachusetts General Hospital

What should the future look like for brain-based pain measurement in the law?  This is the question tackled by our concluding three contributors:  Diane Hoffmann, Henry (“Hank”) T. Greely, and Frank Pasquale. Professors Hoffmann and Greely are among the founders of the fields of health law and law & biosciences. Both discuss parallels to the development of DNA evidence in court and the need for similar standards, practices, and ethical frameworks in the brain imaging area.  Professor Pasquale is an innovative younger scholar who brings great theoretical depth, as well as technological savvy, to these fields.  Their perspectives on the use of brain imaging in legal settings, particularly for pain measurement, illuminate different facets of this issue.

This post describes their provocative contributions – which stake out different visions but also reinforce each other.  The post also highlights the forthcoming conference-based book with Oxford University Press and introduces future directions for the use of the brain imaging of pain – in areas as diverse as the law of torture, the death penalty, drug policy, criminal law, and animal rights and suffering.  Please read on!

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Neuroimaging as Evidence of Pain: It’s Time to Prepare

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By Henry T. Greely, Edelman Johnson Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Professor (by courtesy) of Genetics, Stanford Medical School; Director, Program in Neuroscience & Society, Stanford University

The recent meeting at Harvard on neuroimaging, pain, and the law demonstrated powerfully that the offering of neuroimaging as evidence of pain, in court and in administrative hearings, is growing closer. The science for identifying a likely pattern of neuroimaging results strongly associated with the subjective sensation of pain keeps improving. Two companies (and here) recently were founded to provide electro-encephalography (EEG) evidence of the existence of pain. And at least one neuroscientist has been providing expert testimony that a particular neuroimaging signal detected using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is useful evidence of the existence of pain, as discussed recently in Nature.

If nothing more is done, neuroimaging evidence of pain will be offered, accepted, rejected, relied upon, and discounted in the normal, chaotic course of the law’s evolution. A “good” result, permitting appropriate use of some valid neuroimaging evidence and rejecting inappropriate use of other such evidence, might come about. Or it might not.

We can do better than this existing non-system. And the time to start planning a better approach is now. (Read on for more on how)

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Of Algorithms, Algometry, and Others: Pain Measurement & The Quantification of Distrust

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By Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law

Many thanks to Amanda for the opportunity to post as a guest in this symposium. I was thinking more about neuroethics half a decade ago, and my scholarly agenda has, since then, focused mainly on algorithms, automation, and health IT. But there is an important common thread: The unintended consequences of technology. With that in mind, I want to discuss a context where the measurement of pain (algometry?) might be further algorithmatized or systematized, and if so, who will be helped, who will be harmed, and what individual and social phenomena we may miss as we focus on new and compelling pictures.

Some hope that better pain measurement will make legal disability or damages determinations more scientific. Identifying a brain-based correlate for pain that otherwise lacks a clearly medically-determinable cause might help deserving claimants win recognition for their suffering as disabling. But the history of “rationalizing” disability and welfare determinations is not encouraging. Such steps have often been used to exclude individuals from entitlements, on flimsy grounds of widespread shirking. In other words, a push toward measurement is more often a cover for putting a suspect class through additional hurdles than it is toward finding and helping those viewed as deserving.

Of Disability, Malingering, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Disutility (read on for more)

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An ELSI Program for Pain Research: A Call to Action

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By Diane Hoffmann, Director, Law & Health Care Program; Professor of Law; University of Maryland School of Law

As someone who has been greatly concerned about and devoted much of my scholarship to legal obstacles to the treatment of pain, I applaud Professor Pustilnik for increasing attention to the role of neuroimaging in our efforts to understand our experience of pain and how the law does or does not adequately take into account such experience. Pustilnik has written eloquently about this issue in several published articles but her efforts to bring together scientists, medical experts, legal academics, and judges (see also here) deserves high praise as a method for illuminating what we know and do not know about pain and the brain and to what extent brain imaging can serve as a diagnostic tool or an external validator of pain experience.

In this post, I discuss how DNA testing serves as a precedent for how to develop responsible uses of new technologies in law, including, potentially, brain imaging for pain detection. The ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of DNA research and testing were integral to developing national protocols and rules about DNA. Brain imaging of pain needs its own ELSI initiative, before zealous adoption outpaces both the technology and the thinking about the right guiding principles and limitations.

The idea of brain images serving as a “pain-o-meter” to prove or disprove pain in legal cases is clearly a premature use of this information and likely an over simplification of the mechanisms of pain expression. However, the potential for an objective diagnostic tool or indicator of the pain experience is something that lawyers representing clients in criminal, personal injury, workers comp or disability cases may find too attractive to resist and attempt to have admitted in the courtroom. This state of affairs brings to mind the ways in which lawyers have attempted to use genetic test results, initially obtained for medical purposes, in litigation.  (Read on for more about ELSI in DNA and several national pain initiatives that could adopt the Human Genome Project and DNA ELSI model).

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Emotion and Pain – Beyond “All in Your Head”

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By David Seminowicz, Principal Investigator, Seminowicz Pain Imaging Lab, Department of Neural and Pain Sciences, University of Maryland

A potential difficulty, but also an opportunity, relating to using neuroimaging evidence in legal cases arises from the difficulty brain researchers have in separating emotional and physical pain. We know that pain and emotion are tightly linked. In fact, “emotion” is in the very definition of pain. The IASP definition of pain is: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.”  Yet, the legal system deals with “physical” versus “psychiatric” versus “emotional” pain in different ways.

Chronic pain is associated with anxiety, depression, and stress. These factors can exacerbate the pain, and pain can exacerbate them. Pain’s sensory and emotional components connect in a “feed-forward” cycle. It may not be possible to entirely separate the sensory and emotional components of pain, biologically or experientially. But it might be necessary for the purposes of legal cases, as important areas of law create sharp distinctions between physical and emotional, or body and mind.

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Some Optimism on Brains, Pain, & Law – Let’s See What We Can Achieve

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By Martha Farah, Director, University of Pennsylvania Center for Neuroscience & Society

Neurolaw includes some fascinating issues that lack any practical legal significance – for example whether we should consider anyone responsible for anything they do, given that all behavior is physically caused by brain processes.  It also includes some legally important issues that lack intellectual juiciness – like regulatory issues surrounding neurotechnology.

Thank goodness there are also some issues that combine intellectual fascination with practical legal importance. The Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital recently focused on just such an issue when they convened a meeting of neuroscientists and legal scholars on the brain imaging of pain.

Pain, I learned at this meeting, is at the heart of many legal proceedings. A major problem to be solved in these proceedings is the determination of whether someone is truly in pain. Chronic pain in particular may not have physically obvious causes. There may be clinical and circumstantial evidence of pain – like adhering to a medication regime, seeking surgeries or other interventional procedures, and avoiding pleasurable activities – but often the major evidence of pain is just what someone says that it is. However, the motivation exists to lie about pain – to sue for more money, to obtain disability benefits – and so an objective measure of pain, a “pain-o-meter,” would be helpful.

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Pain on the Brain: A Week of Guest Posts on Pain Neuroimaging & Law

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By Amanda C. Pustilnik

This week, the Petrie-Flom Center of Harvard Law School and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) at Massachusetts General Hospital are hosting a series of posts on how brain imaging can help the law address issues of physical and emotional pain. Our contributors are world leaders in their fields, who participated on June 30, 2015, in the CLBB/Petrie-Flom conference Visible Solutions: How Brain Imaging Can Help Law Reenvision Pain.  They addressed questions including:

  • Can brain imaging can be a “painometer” to prove pain in legal cases?
  • Can neuroimaging help law do better at understanding what pain is?
  • How do emotion and pain relate to each other?
  • Does brain imaging showing emotional pain prompt us to reconsider law’s mind/body divide?

Professor Irene Tracey, D.Phil., a pioneer in pain neuroimaging and director of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, opened the conference with a keynote explaining what happens when the brain is in pain.

Professor Hank T. Greely, Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Neuroscience and Society at Stanford Law School, provided a keynote explaining the many implications of brain imaging for the law.

This conference was the culmination of CLBB’s year of work on pain neuroimaging and law. As the first CLBB-Petrie-Flom Center Senior Fellow on Law & Applied Neuroscience, I focused on pain because it is one of the largest social, economic, and legal problems that can be addressed through new insights into the brain. Pain imaging can be a test case for how neuroscience can contribute positively to law and culture.  (Full conference video proceedings are available here.)  Please read on below! Read More

The Curious Case of “Mr. Oft”

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by Zachary Shapiro

In the course of my year-long project with Petrie-Flom, I am studying the potential impact of neuroimaging techniques on criminal law. During the course of my research, I found a story of an individual whose case presents difficult questions for our conceptions of criminal guilt and responsibility. [1] While this may be a bit longer than a normal entry, I want to share this story with you.

In 2000, a 40 year-old man, “Mr. Oft”, found himself developing an increasing, and nearly uncontrollable, interest in child pornography.[2] Mr. Oft began collecting pornographic material, while making efforts to conceal his behavior from his family, and from those who knew him. Collecting pornography gave way to soliciting prostitution at “massage parlors,” and while Mr. Oft at first made careful attempts to conceal his actions, his aberrant behavior continued, and soon Mr. Oft was obsessively collecting and downloading child pornography, both at work and at home.[3] Before long, Mr. Oft began making subtle sexual advances toward his prepubescent stepdaughter. After several weeks, his stepdaughter informed his wife of this behavior, leading to the discovery of his newly collected child pornography.[4]

After his wife reported him, Oft was found guilty of child molestation and was ordered to either undergo inpatient rehabilitation in a 12-step program for sexual addiction or go to jail. Despite Oft’s strong and clear desire to avoid prison, he found himself unable to resist soliciting sexual favors from staff and other clients at the rehabilitation center. The center expelled him, and Mr. Oft prepared to go to jail. However, the night before his sentence was to begin, Oft was admitted to the University of Virginia Hospital emergency department complaining of severe headaches. In the course of his neurological examination, Oft made numerous sexual advances towards the hospital staff, and appeared totally unconcerned after urinating on himself. This behavior, combined with his seemingly unsteady gait, caused doctors to undertake a full neurological evaluation, eventually ordering an MRI scan of his brain.

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