Project description
Rethinking insanity in the courtroom
What exactly is criminally insane? Who gets to decide? Courtrooms throughout Europe use a centuries-old legal doctrine to determine whether an individual was responsible for their behaviour. But today, that doctrine relies heavily on psychiatric diagnoses never intended for legal use. This can lead to a lack of clarity, arbitrariness, and unfairness. The law can reflect the complexity of mental illnesses. With this in mind, the ERC-funded project COMPLEX will carry out a legal analysis mixed with philosophy and mind sciences. Specifically, it will study how courts across countries understand and apply insanity laws. The findings will pave the way for a fairer system.
Objective
The fundamental legal doctrine of criminal insanity is found in most legal orders. It concerns a defendant’s lack of capacity for responsible action and defines the justifiable use of punishment. It is a key entrance point for comprehending how law conceives of agency and deviancy, but also a highly controversial legal construct. A major concern is that there is a mismatch between how criminal insanity has been paradigmatically understood in law and how it is today inevitably associated with mental disorders. This doctrine has been formulated in terms of folk psychological notions of rational agency but increasingly relies on psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms, with forensic experts as premise providers in criminal proceedings.
However, psychiatric constructs were not developed for criminal law and people diagnosed with mental disorders may have vastly varying functional impairments. Legal research has yet to elucidate how this complexity plays out in criminal insanity rules and judgements. There is a pressing need for cross-country empirical and interdisciplinary legal studies that integrate insights from mind sciences to explore this matter. The lack of legal clarity about the relevance of mental disorders raises concerns about the rule of law, unequal treatment, and criminal justice.
COMPLEX will advance our understanding of law’s associations between criminal insanity and mental disorders, with a research design that transcends conventional legal research by combining cross-country empirical studies of current legal doctrines with interdisciplinary analysis of how the normative and factual legal premises about mental disorders involved in these doctrines relate to philosophy and mind sciences. The ambition is to provide a new theoretical framework for understanding mental disorders in criminal law. COMPLEX has the potential to challenge current paradigms and have major implications for both science and society.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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5020 Bergen
Norway
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