Blaming the Addicted Brain: Building bridges between criminal law and neuroscientific perspectives on addiction

Addiction is a pervasive issue in the criminal justice sector, leading to debates over its conceptualization and challenges in addressing addiction-related crime in court. This book explores the different ways of conceptualizing addiction and assesses its compatibility with legal concepts such as intent, premeditation, insanity, diminished responsibility, and prior fault. It also evaluates the law in action, including the role of addiction in case files, the presence of neuroscientific information, its influence on legal decision-making, and experiential accounts of legal professionals. The author contributes to interdisciplinary and empirical (neuro)legal research.

Format: Hardback
Length: 338 pages
Publication date: 31 March 2022
Publisher: Eleven International Publishing

Addiction permeates the criminal justice sector, leading legal professionals to encounter defendants grappling with substance abuse issues on a regular basis. However, addiction presents a multifaceted and diverse phenomenon, giving rise to controversies surrounding its conceptualization, thereby complicating the treatment of addiction-related crimes in court. Over the past few decades, addiction has been increasingly perceived as a brain disease, which has the potential to reshape the current legal approach towards the criminal liability of individuals with addiction. In this book, an extensive exploration of various addiction conceptualizations is presented, with a focus on their application within the legal framework of Dutch criminal law and to more universal legal concepts. By examining the compatibility of concepts such as intent, premeditation, insanity, diminished responsibility, and prior fault with potentially impaired capacities arising from addiction, this book critically assesses the existing legal framework. The second half of the book delves into the "law in action," encompassing the role of addiction in case files, the incorporation of neuroscientific information in cases involving addicted defendants, its influence on legal decision-making, and experiential accounts of legal professionals. Employing a combination of normative, comparative, and experimental designs, the author not only analyzes the complexities of addiction within the criminal justice context but also contributes to the growing practice of interdisciplinary and empirical (neuro)legal research.

Dimension: 240 x 165 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789462362826