Legal Evidence of Subjective States: A Brain-Based Model of Chronic Pain Increases Accuracy and Fairness in Law.

Advances in structural and functional neuroimaging offer new ways to conceptualize chronic pain disorders and to prevent, diagnose, and treat chronic pain. Advances in pain science, though, do not entail changes in the concepts of chronic pain in law and culture. Authoritative legal and cultural conceptions of chronic pain continue to promote abstruse theories, characterizing these disorders as arising out of everything from a person's unmet need for love to resistance to "patriarchy.

Pain as a fact and heuristic: how pain neuroimaging illuminates moral dimensions of law.

In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has a confounding lack of external verifiability. Now, neuroimaging is rendering pain and myriad other subjective states at least partly ascertainable.