Owen Jones, J.D.

Owen D. Jones holds the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law at Vanderbilt University, where he is also Professor of Biological Sciences.  In addition, he presently serves as Director of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project.  Jones is a leading scholar on issues at the intersection of law and behavioral biology.  His current empirical research uses brain-imaging (fMRI), primatology, and behavioral economics to learn more about how the brain's varied operations affect behaviors relevant to law. Most recently, he and colleagues at Vanderbilt discovered the brain activity underlying decisions of whether to punish someone and, if so, how much.

Jones is a graduate of Amherst College and Yale Law School.  Before joining the legal academy, Jones clerked for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and practiced law with the D.C. law firm Covington & Burling.  Jones served from 2007 to 2010 as Co-Director of a MacArthur Foundation research network on legal decision making, which explored the relevance of neuroscience to criminal law. He also is Director and former President of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (S.E.A.L.), an international interdisciplinary scholarly organization whose members focus on issues at the intersection of law, biology, and behavior.

Jones has for several years co-taught a course titled “Law and the Brain,” which is also the title of the 32-chapter coursebook he is preparing -- along with co-authors Dr. Jeffrey Schall, a neuroscientist, and Dr. Francis Shen, a J.D./Ph.D. Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt.

Website: http://law.vanderbilt.edu/jones

Publications: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=142209