By Richard Glen Boire

The law advances by looking through a rearview mirror. Judges cite pre-existing legal opinions and reason by analogy to reach decisions in current controversies. This makes the legal system an inherently conservative institution, one that will be caught stiff-legged by the complexities about to be unleashed upon it by developments in neurotechnology.

As Wrye Sententia outlined last week, widely acknowledged legal principles of privacy, autonomy, and choice must be evolved in order to adapt to the swiftly changing technological environment. “Cognitive liberty” is an effort to accelerate legal thinking about, well, thinking.

Currently, "freedom of thought," remains a legal notion little developed beyond Enlightenment Era understandings of the brain and mind. For the past few centuries, freedom of thought has been largely about buttressing reason and logic, and the major mind-changing technology has been the printing press. Today, however, we are unlocking secrets of the brain, and simultaneously developing drugs and other technologies that make it possible to produce specific changes in how a person thinks.

These changes pose a major jurisprudential challenge. And, unfortunately, when we look back at how our legal system has dealt with previous technological changes that bump up against deeply entrenched notions of the “normal” or “natural,” there is little reason for optimism.

I’ll discuss some of this legal precedent more specifically in my next post.