School of Law

John completed his undergraduate degree in law at University College Cork (Ireland) in 2006. He then moved to Trinity College Dublin where he completed his LLM in 2007. His masters dissertation focused primarily on the use of behavioural scientific evidence in the assessment of legal responsibility.

Following this, he moved back to University College Cork for his PhD, which analysed the impact that advances in the neurosciences are likely to have upon the theoretical foundations of criminal responsibility. This research was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. He was awarded his PhD in August 2011.

John’s research interests lie in the relationship between advances in the sciences and technologies of human behaviour and the criminal law. His current research focuses on the use of scientific evidence in criminal trials, the regulation of human enhancement, and the philosophy of criminal responsibility.

He adopts a formal and philosophical approach to all of these issues, drawing in particular upon developments in game theory and moral philosophy.

John would be happy to supervise research in the areas of criminal law theory, science and law, and in some areas looking at the impact of economic theory on legal policy.

Journal Publications

• Danaher, J. "Kramer's Purgative Rationale for Capital Punishment: A Critique" (2013) Criminal Law and Philosophy DOI 10.1007/s11572-013-9251-8

• Danaher, J. "Skeptical Theism and Divine Permission - A Reply to Anderson" (2013) International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, DOI: 10.1007/s11153-013-9429-y

• Danaher, J. "On the Need for Epistemic Enhancement: Democratic Legitimacy and the Enhancement Project" (2013) 5(1) Law Innovation and Technology, 85-112

• Danaher, J. "The Vice of In-Principlism and the Harmfulness of Love" (2013) American Journal of Bioethics (Open Peer Commentary), DOI:10.1080/15265161.2013.839769

• Danaher, J. "Stumbling on the Threshold: A Reply to Gwiazda on Threshold Obligations" (2012) 48(4) Religious Studies 469-478

• Danaher, J. “The Future of Brain-based Lie Detection and the Admissibility of Scientific Evidence” (2011) 21(4) Irish Criminal Law Journal, 67-76

• Danaher, J. "Blind Expertise and the Problem of Scientific Evidence", (2011)15(3) International Journal of Evidence and Proof 207.

• Danaher, J. "Scientific Evidence and the Criminal Law: Lessons from Brain-based lie Detection" (2010) 1 Judicial Studies Institute Journal 94.

Book Chapters

• Danaher, J. “Enhanced Control and Criminal Responsibility” in Hildt and Franke (eds) Cognitive Enhancement: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,  Trends in the Augmentation of Human Performance Volume 1 (Springer-Verlag, 2013)

• Danaher, J. "Responsible Innovation in Social Epistemic Systems: The P300 Memory Detection Test and the Legal Trial" in Van den Hoven et al (Eds) Responsible Innovation Volume II: Concepts, Approaches, Applications (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming - 2014)

Undergraduate Teaching:

Jurisprudence

Crime 2

Company Law

Law and Ethics

Law and Economics

Postgraduate teaching:

Medical Ethics and Law

MMedSci

Safeguarding Adults

John’s personal webpage, which includes pdfs of some of his publications, can be found here.

His academia.edu page, which also includes pdfs of some publications, is available here.

And his blog, which covers a variety of issues related to his research interests, is over here.