Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week I'm chatting with University of Minnesota law professor Francis Shen about the emerging field of Neurolaw and how law schools are—and aren't—embracing it. Next I'm taking a skeptical eye to the proposed relocation of Valparaiso University's struggling law school to Middle Tennessee State University. Finally, I'm checking on Minnesota Law's cool new student wellness room that comes with a sobering backstory.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

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Neurolaw: The Final Frontier

Do you have the cheesy Star Trek theme song in your head now? Good.

The brain is a complex machine that processes every decision we make, yet relatively little research has centered on how the brain influences the law and vice versa. Enter Neurolaw, an emerging field of legal inquiry that a small but growing cohort of law professors are pursuing in hopes of better understanding the interplay between the supercomputer in our skull and the legal system.

I've written the occasional article about studies that utilized neuroscience to probe a legal question (Here's one about how jurors can't reliably differentiate between knowing and reckless conduct), but I haven't given much thought to the bigger picture until now. So I called up Francis Shen, a professor at the University of Minnesota and Neurolaw evangelist, to give me the lay of the land. (He runs Minnesota Law's Shen Neurolaw Lab) My first question was: “What the heck is Neurolaw?” Here's what he told me:

“The big idea is that law makes lots of assumptions about how humans make decisions, and law is also in the business of modifying those decisions. If neuroscience can give law more insight into how we make decisions and how we can modify those decisions, then maybe law can do its job better. There are a lot of potential applications.”

Here are some of the issues Shen and his colleagues have studied:

➤➤How do people go about inferring the mental states of others? This is obviously relevant in the context of juries on criminal trials.

➤➤Should sentencing enhancement for crimes involving bodily injury also apply to mental injuries?

➤➤How does neuroscience evidence influence the evaluation of a fictional defendant? Put another way, does introducing this evidence change the way people view a particular case?

Shen told me a handful of law schools are getting out in front of Neurolaw, including Minnesota; Vanderbilt Law School; Stanford Law School; the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Harvard Law School; Yale Law School; and the University of Wisconsin Law School. Each has faculty focused on the law and the brain. Practitioners and judges are also starting to show interest, though there's a long way to go before Neurolaw is a staple in courtrooms.

Here's who is very interested in Neurolaw: law students. “There's a clear generational shift happening,” Shen said, noting that neuroscience is still a relatively young field. “There are more neuroscience majors being produced now than ever before. I'm seeing a lot of those undergrads coming into the law world and are interested in taking what they know about the brain and trying to translate that into law and policy. Slowly but surely we'll see this change.”

My thoughts: Sure, law students are pretty open to this newfangled avenue of legal study. That makes sense to me. But what about the more traditional legal academy? I asked Shen whether he's met with skepticism from more by-the-book law professors. In a word: Yes. But reactions vary. Shen said that when he entered the law teaching market seven years ago, schools fell into three distinct categories. Some were enthusiastic about the possibilities of Neurolaw; others just didn't get it. A third group saw potential but took a wait-and-see approach. I think Neurolaw is a smart bet. At the very least, it's appealing to those STEM-background students we keep hearing about whom law schools want to attract.

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Who Wants a Law School? Me, Me!

News broke last week that Middle Tennessee State University is moving forward with a proposed acquisition of the struggling Valparaiso University School of Law, which is located 500 miles and two states away. Both universities signed off on the plan, and it now awaits the blessing of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and the American Bar Association. The news isn't unexpected. Both schools revealed in June that they were considering a deal. And Valparaiso has been open about its hopes to unload its law school since November when it announced that it would not accept any new students this fall.

If the deal goes through, Middle Tennessee will have the state's third ABA-accredited law school at a public university and Tennessee's sixth law school overall. University President Sidney McPhee made clear that Middle Tennessee was not purchasing the law school from Valparaiso, nor is it pursuing a merger. Rather, Valparaiso is gifting the school to a new home. He also batted away skepticism of the plan, citing two different feasibility studies that found, “the need for an accredited, public law school in the Middle Tennessee region.” McPhee went even further, saying, “We have gone to great lengths to assure that this opportunity is in the best interests of MTSU, the city of Murfreesboro, and the citizens of Middle Tennessee. This has been a very deliberate undertaking and one that I feel confident is both academically and fiscally sound.”

My take: I haven't laid eyes on these feasibility reports, so I can't speak to their findings. But I thought it was interesting that McPhee said there is a “need” for the law school in the area, as opposed to “demand” for a law school. Anyone at all familiar with the justice gap can tell you there is a vast need for access to lawyers among low and modest-income clients pretty much everywhere. That's not the same thing as people clamoring to go to law school in your region and serve those populations—a notoriously difficult proposition given that lack of economic resources involved. I understand that national interest in law school ticked up this year, but we have no idea whether or not that will be sustained. I'd counsel Middle Tennessee to proceed with extreme caution.

Let There Be Light

That's sort of a jokey headline but law student wellness isn't a laughing matter. Numerous studies show that law students suffer from anxiety, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse at higher rates than other college and graduate students. Which I why I think it's great the University of Minnesota Law School recently opened up a wellness room for students.

The room includes couches, yoga mats, water painting materials, board games, coloring and—my favorite—a light therapy lamp. The room is intended to be a place where students can set their books aside and de-stress. But there's a sad story behind this welcome addition to Minnesota Law.

Brennan Gaeth graduated from the Minneapolis law school in 2017 after struggling with addiction. He committed suicide after leaving campus. His family wanted to help other students deal with the high-stress law school environment and donated funds to bring the wellness room online. Here's hoping that students utilize it …

Extra Credit Reading

Sure, the early number of applicants being approved for Public Service Loan Forgiveness are small. (A mere one percent got the green light from the U.S. Department of Education.) But experts say those counting on the program to erase their loan debts, including law students and recent graduates, should not despair because approval rates should increase as the program matures.

If you want to feel like an underachiever, in the decade since graduating from Yale Law School, Becca Heller has made the group she co-founded, the International Refugee Assistance Project, into a major refugee rights player. Oh, and she was just awarded a $625,000 MacArthur “genius grant.”

An obscure group out of Texas has sued both the Harvard Law Review and the New York University Law Review, claiming they have racial and gender preference policies for both membership and article selection that violate federal law.

Here's a slideshow of Santa Clara University School of Law's shiny new campus, Charney Hall, which was formally dedicated last week.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]