Neuroscience is coming to the law: what is happening and what should we know about it?
ENToday the world is in a time of change where values, attitudes, and thought paradigms are changing. These days, old science – deterministic and mechanistic thinking, based on absolute clarity, predictability, and objectivity – resists the new postmodern science of complex dynamic systems. This new scientific paradigm, implying an open interdisciplinary approach, contextual relevance, integrity, and “the demolition of the walls” is a new phase of changes in which the world of science struggles, and in which scientific paradigms and methodologies change. Interdisciplinarity is a very important feature of the new science. The new science encourages sciences to engage with each other. One phenomenon that is growing in importance in terms of interdisciplinarity is neuroscience and its dialogue with other sciences. Neuroscience is appearing everywhere and it is coming to the law. It is of great importance to evaluate the dialogue between neuroscience and law, how it manifests itself, is it inevitable dialogue or temporary dialogue. The aim of this paper is a conceptual overview what is neuroscience, the dialogue between neuroscience and law, what is happening in the world about the dialogue between neuroscience and law, how much it is widespread over scientific articles, and answering the question whether this dialogue is inevitable.Methods: theoretical–scientific analytical, systematic and critical review and analysis of scientific literature and other relevant sources; empirical–quantitative analysis of scientific articles. The main finding: it is high time to change the approach to science itself. Legal science should become increasingly open to cognition, innovation and changes. We suppose that legal scholars increasingly will be able to maintain, develop and improve the dialogue both “inside” among legal scholars and practitioners as well as with representatives of other sciences, and in particular in search of truth and justice. I believe that neuroscience and law dialogue is inevitable, we should be critical, but open to new changes. I hope that Lithuania will have not to wait long to enormous changes that will allow us to get closer the truth and justice, which are very important to each of us.
