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In the past five years, we have witnessed extraordinary growth in the amount of legal scholarship, legal practice, and public policy at the intersection of law and neuroscience. For instance, in 2010 the first Daubert hearing was held on the admissibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection evidence; a Florida court was the first in the nation to admit quantitative encephalography (qEEG) evidence; and a Supreme Court decision on life imprisonment for minors cited brain development research. In France, the Prime Minister established the first Neuroscience and Public Policy program within the France Ministry for Social Affairs, and in the United States, multiple state legislators proposed bills related to neuroscience and law. Academics, too, have taken notice, with a number of symposia being offered around the country over the past few years.

Many have long suspected that when America takes up arms it is a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight. In 'The Casualty Gap' Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen renew the debate over unequal sacrifice by bringing to light mountains of new evidence on the inequality dimensions of American wartime casualties

ABSTRACTIn the 2016 election, foreign policy may have played a critically important role in swinging an important constituency to Donald Trump: voters in high-casualty communities that had abandoned Republican candidates in the mid-2000s. Trump's iconoclastic campaign rhetoric promised a foreign policy that would simultaneously be more muscular and restrained. He promised to rebuild and refocus the military while avoiding the "stupid wars" and costly entanglements of his predecessors. At both the state and county levels, we find significant and substantively meaningful relationships between local casualty rates and support for Trump. Trump made significant electoral gains among constituencies that were exhausted and politically alienated by 18 years of fighting. Trump's foreign policy shows a president beset by competing militaristic and isolationist impulses. Our results suggest that giving into the former may come at a significant electoral cost.

While recent scholarship suggests that conscription decreases support for military action, we argue that its effect is contingent both on a draft's consequences for inequality in military sacrifice and on partisanship. In an experiment examining public support for defending South Korea, we find that reinstating the draft significantly decreases support for war among Democrats; however, this effect is diminished if the draft reduces inequality in sacrifice. Support for war among Republicans, by contrast, responds neither to information about conscription nor its inequality ramifications. A follow-up experiment shows that conscription continues to significantly decrease support for war, even in the context of a retaliatory strike against a foreign state that targeted American forces. Moreover, partisanship and the inequality ramifications of the draft continue to moderate the relationships between conscription and public opinion. More broadly, our study emphasizes the importance of examining how Americans evaluate foreign policy–relevant information through partisan lenses.