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Owen Jones specializes in the intersection of law and behavioral biology. Holding joint academic appointments, he uses methods and insights from brain-imaging (fMRI), evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics to learn more about how the brain's varied operations affect behaviors relevant to law. With four grants from the MacArthur Foundation, totaling over 7.6 million dollars, he designed, created and directs the national Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. The Network partners selected legal scholars and brain scientists at leading universities, including Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Virginia, Cornell, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, to explore systematically both the promise and the limitations of using new neuroscientific techniques to improve criminal justice. Since 2011, this Network team has published more than 95 brain-scanning and conceptual works.

Professor Jones – one of the authors of the book Law and Neuroscience – has authored or co-authored more than 50 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays in such legal venues as the Columbia, Chicago, California, NYU, Northwestern, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and Michigan law reviews, and in such leading scientific journals as Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, the Journal of Neuroscience, Current Biology, Evolution and Human Behavior, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Before joining the legal academy, Jones was a law clerk for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and practiced law with the D.C. law firm Covington & Burling. Professor Jones was named a Chancellor’s Chair in 2010 and became the inaugural holder of the Weaver Chair in 2019. In 2014 he received the 2014 Joe. B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor Award, which annually honors one member of the Vanderbilt University faculty for accomplishments that bridge multiple academic disciplines and yield significant new knowledge from research. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Contracts

Law and Neuroscience

Law and Behavioral Sciences

Law and Behavioral Biology

Evolutionary Analysis in Law

Vanderbilt University Profile

Vanderbilt University News Profile

Why Neuroscience is Coming to Courtrooms

Blame my brain: A killer's bold defense gets a court hearing

The Brain Gets Its Day in Court

The End of (Discussing) Free Will

Glenn M. Weaver, M.D. and Mary Ellen Weaver Chair in Law, Brain, and Behavior

An innovative two-part television series, Brains on Trial with Alan Alda, aired Wednesday, September 11, 2013 (Part I) and Wednesday, September 18, 2013 (Part II). The program explores how advances in neuroscience may affect how criminal trials are conducted in the future.

Brains on Trial centers around the trial of a fictional crime. The first of two episodes examines the guilt phase of the trial concluding with the jury’s verdict. The second looks at the sentencing phase, when arguments for and against a severe sentence are heard.

This video features an interview with Owen D. Jones, Glenn M. Weaver, M.D. and Mary Ellen Weaver Chair in Law, Brain, and Behavior
Professor of Law
Professor of Biological Sciences
Director, MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience hosted at Vanderbilt Law School.

Interviewed by Alan Alda, Hollywood actor, Brains on Trial (with Alan Alda)
Recorded March 2012
Law and Neuroscience
www.lawneuro.org
https://www.lawneuro.org/people.php#admin

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Owen D. Jones - Interviewed by Alan Alda, on Law and Neuroscience

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