This volume grew out of my Harvard seminar on The Insanity Defense. The seminar reconsidered and updated earlier attention to mental disorder in relation to the law and also expanded its focus to examine at greater length the roles of religion and terrorism in conceptualizing and implementing the insanity defense. The contributors reviewed the earlier book, Thinking About the Insanity Defense, as well as current research and comment on the broader topics of this volume. All participants discussed these topics and cases and research and collaboratively wrote these materials. Profiles of all appear in About the Contributors.
This book follows the format of the earlier ones by posing and answering basic and additional frequently asked questions. Because the answer to each question is self-contained and because readers may choose to explore the book in various ways, some materials are repeated where necessary to answer each question. For simplicity, the masculine pronoun has been used throughout when both males and females may be involved. On some occasions, a plural accompanies a singular to make the same point.
Embedded within the questions and answers are a number of case examples which illustrate the general points about the topics. Although this volume includes an extensive bibliography, it does not refer specifically to the listings within the text itself. To facilitate reading, specific references were removed. The effort of the contributors while preparing this volume was to summarize what others discovered,
learned, thought, and presented, and then, finally, to offer some of their own reflections. As with a New Yorker piece on psychopathy or a New York Times Magazine piece on neurolaw, this volume is intended for the general reader and not for the researcher or for the scholar.
The aim of this volume is to assist that reader in thinking about the insanity defense in its relation to mental disorder, religion, and terrorism by presenting a number of competing materials. The book includes as many alternatives as possible in order to address the widely varying approaches to this controversial interaction between legal and psychological approaches to human behavior. At the same time, the bibliography provides a complete list of references for those who may wish to examine further some aspect of the overall topic. All who have been involved with this volume urge those who read it to explore at length many of the contributions of those authors and others, and to continue the important work of following the controversies surrounding the use in law and in psychology of the insanity defense. It is the hope of everyone who contributed to Thinking About Insanity, Religion, and
Terrorism that the book will encourage all readers to pursue cases and concepts in the exciting world where psychology, neuroscience, genetics, law, religion, terror, and public policy interact.
