Law and Nature

INTRODUCTION: THE ROOTS OF DANGER

In chapter 13 we encountered people who claimed to have had troubles with nature – with their biochemistry or genetic inheritance – that resulted in their having troubles with law. In most cases, as we saw, the biological framings offered to judges by defense attorneys were refused. I suggested that some judges were apprehensive about the consequences for law of accepting these more naturalizing renderings of human violence. In the present chapter we look at situations that are similar to these in some respects but that occur within a different set of legal-cum-medical contexts. Here culpability of the legal subject is not being assessed; the subject is already incarcerated. The body is already under the control of the state. One dimension of the problem is determining whether there are physical and normative limits to that control.

Like some of the people who put forward biological defenses, Walter Harper was having troubles with nature (Washington v. Harper, 494 US 210, 1989). One culturally significant way of grasping the nature of these troubles is to say that he had “a dysregulation in certain brain regions of the dopamine system” (Julien 1996, 245). This dysregulation, in turn, might be causally related to “a low production of glutamic acid decarboxylase” or, perhaps, to “dopaminergic overactivity in the basal ganglia which could be secondary to dorsal lateral-prefontal cortical (DLPFC) GABA deficit and a corresponding alteration in the input to subcortical nuclei” or, maybe it is related to a “combined dysfunction of dopamine and N-methyl-D-asparate-glutamate receptors” (247–248, internal quotes deleted).