Emily Murphy

Associate Professor of Law UC Hastings College of the Law

  • San Francisco CA

Professor Murphy's research focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral science, and the law.

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UC Hastings College of the Law

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Biography

Professor Murphy's research focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral science, and law. She writes about the use of neuroscience as evidence and how neuroscience and behavioral science shape public policy and legal systems. Prior to joining UC Hastings, Professor Murphy spent a year as a fellow in the Program in Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence at UCLA Law School. Before that, she practiced law at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, handling all aspects of complex commercial litigation, with an emphasis on professional liability and internal investigations. She represented clients in higher education, financial services, and professional services. Her pro bono practice focuses on housing issues and civil rights work addressing homelessness.

Professor Murphy earned her A.B. magna cum laude in Psychology from Harvard University, her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience and Psychopharmacology from University of Cambridge, Trinity College, as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and her J.D. from Stanford Law School where she received the Gerald Gunther Prizes in Constitutional Litigation and Professional Responsibility. Prior to law school she was a postdoc with Stanford Law School's Center for Law and the Biosciences as well as the MacArthur Foundation's Law and Neuroscience Project. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her recent work has been published in Stanford Law Review, Law & Psychology Review, and Psychology Public Policy & Law.

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Areas of Expertise

Contracts
Experimental Methods in Law
Brain / Behavioral Science and Law
Remedies
Evidence
Civil Procedure
Negotiation

Education

Stanford Law School

J.D.

2012

University of Cambridge, Trinity College

Ph.D.

Behavioral Neuroscience / Psychopharmacology

2007

Harvard University

A.B.

Psychology / Mind, Brain, Behavior

2003

Event Appearances

The Enduring Importance of In re Gault: Neuroscience, the Juvenile Brain, and the Law

Youth, Rights & Justice  Portland, Oregon

2017-05-15

A Question of Fit: Translating Neuroscience for Law, Clinical Care, and Policy.

UCSF / UC Hastings Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy  San Francisco, CA.

2017-02-16

Disentitlement as Discrimination, Flash Lecture (Competitive Selection)

International Neuroethics Society Annual Meeting  

2016-11-11

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Selected Articles

Paved with Good Intentions: Sentencing Alternatives from Neuroscience and the Policy of Problem-Solving Courts

Law and Psychology Review

2013

Advances in basic and clinical neuroscience will soon present novel options for prediction, treatment, and prevention of antisocial behavior, particularly drug addiction. These hard-won advances have significant potential to improve public health and safety and increase efficiency in delivery of treatment and rehabilitation. Moreover, such therapies will undoubtedly find a large portion of their target population in the criminal justice system as long as drug possession remains criminalized. Improvements, however, are not without risks. The risks stem not only from the safety and side-effect profile of such treatments, but also from their insertion into a criminal justice and sentencing system that may be overburdened, overpoliticized, undertheorized, and lacking sufficient checks and balances on institutional competency and legitimacy.

Furthermore, as neurological and biological therapies become more targeted and effective, they may threaten to override multi-faceted rehabilitation measures designed to address the social, cultural, economic, and psychological aspects of drug use and involvement with the criminal justice system. While offering substantial therapeutic benefits, such advances might also short-circuit a critical policy discussion about the nature of drug use and its criminalization.

New neuroscience treatments for addiction and antisocial behavior should force a deep examination of the legal, social, political, and ethical roots of drug and problem-solving courts, and particularly the mixed criminal justice/public health model on which they rest. As technologies to control behavior become more direct, targeted, and powerful, so do the risks of their misuse and potential harms to constitutional rights, individual autonomy, institutional competency, and institutional legitimacy.

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Neuroimages as Evidence in a Mens Rea Defense: No Impact

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

2011

Recent developments in the neuropsychology of criminal behavior have given rise to concerns that neuroimaging evidence (such as MRI and functional MRI [fMRI] images) could unduly influence jurors. Across four experiments, a nationally representative sample of 1,476 jury-eligible participants evaluated written summaries of criminal cases in which expert testimony was presented in support of a mental disorder as exculpatory. The evidence varied in the extent to which it presented neuroscientific explanations and neuroimages in support of the expert's conclusion. Despite suggestive findings from previous research, we found no evidence that neuroimagery affected jurors' judgments (verdicts, sentence recommendations, judgments of the defendant's culpability) over and above verbal neuroscience-based testimony. A meta-analysis of our four experiments confirmed these findings. In addition, we found that neuroscientific evidence was more effective than clinical psychological evidence in persuading jurors that the defendant's disorder reduced his capacity to control his actions, although this effect did not translate into differences in verdicts.

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Impulsive Behaviour Induced by Both NMDA Receptor Antagonism and GABAA Receptor Activation in Rat Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.

Psychopharmacology

2011

RATIONALE:
Previous work has demonstrated a profound effect of N-methyl-D: -aspartic acid receptor (NMDAR) antagonism in the infralimbic cortex (IL) to selectively elevate impulsive responding in a rodent reaction time paradigm. However, the mechanism underlying this effect is unclear.

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