The Future of Evidence: Legal Expert Alexis Agathocleous + Neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps

• Legal, Politics & Economics
• Science & Health

How do we face a future when the long-held promise of visual and scientific evidence is increasingly precarious? Despite overwhelming visual evidence and documentation, we continue to witness and experience repetitive cycles of conflict and violence near and far on a daily basis. Social justice lawyer Alexis Agathocleous speaks with neuroscientist Liz Phelps to think about both the potential and limits of memory, visual evidence, and how to mobilize these toward a more just world.

Alexis Agathocleous is a staff attorney in the Innocence Project’s strategic litigation unit, where he focuses on law reform efforts around eyewitness identifications. Prior to joining the Innocence Project in 2017, Mr. Agathocleous was Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where he litigated federal civil rights cases involving prisoners’ rights, gender and LGBTQ justice, racial and religious profiling, and the criminalization of dissent. Previously, he was the Director of the Reinvestigation Project at the Office of the Appellate Defender (OAD) in New York City, where he also represented indigent defendants on appeal from felony convictions as a senior staff attorney. Mr. Agathocleous was a Karpatkin Fellow with the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and graduated from Brown University in 1997 and Yale Law School in 2003.

Elizabeth A. Phelps received her PhD from Princeton University in 1989, served on the faculty of Yale University until 1999, and is currently the Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. Her laboratory has earned widespread acclaim for its groundbreaking research on how the human brain processes emotion, particularly as it relates to learning, memory, and decision making. Dr. Phelps is the recipient of the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Neuroethics, and Society for Neuroeconomics. Dr. Phelps was the President of the Society for Neuroeconomics, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Social and Affective Neuroscience, and served as the editor of the journal Emotion.