Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture

edited by Susanna L. Blumenthal

Headline-grabbing murders are not the only cases in which sanity has been disputed in the American courtroom. Susanna Blumenthal traces this litigation, revealing how ideas of human consciousness, agency, and responsibility have shaped American jurisprudence as judges struggled to reconcile Enlightenment rationality with new sciences of the mind.