“RGB”
(Richard Glen Boire)
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2020’s Primary Intellectual Interest: Existential risk, civilization collapse, sustaining the beauty of life.
I lend a hand at efforts to design omni-win civilization, with a particular focus on re-conceptualizing and legal hard-coding “individual rights” beyond the “individual.”
Specific work focuses on “cognitive liberty” (i.e., freedom of thought in the modern world), with a trans-disciplinary post-enlightenment, almost borderline Dzogchen approach.
What Others Say (aka “references”):
Richard Glen Boire’s career-long efforts to excavate freedom of thought from the historical limitations of conventional constitutional law and to translate and develop it into a modern, science-based right to cognitive liberty, are in my experience, without parallel.
— Ira Glasser, Past President (23 years) American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
It is frankly impossible to overstate the importance of Richard Glen Boire’s work and thinking for the future of any democratic response to the challenges posed by transformations in technologies of life and cognition. Smart drugs, neurological enhancement, genetic therapy, cloning, stem cell research: all of these and many more technical innovations pose legal, ethical and political conundrums whose negotiation (or lack thereof) will greatly and directly influence the kind of planet and society we are likely to inhabit over the next twenty to fifty years. Richard recognized early and with great precision that along with the tremendously exciting advances in the human capacity to manipulate life and cognition through technologies, our responsibilities also amplify and must be matched by an outburst of innovation and thinking just as impressive as the biotechnological and neurological revolutions themselves.
— Richard Doyle, Professor Science, Medicine, Technology & Culture, Penn State University
Mr. Boire is doing the most interesting work in the country on some extremely important and undeveloped questions at the intersection of moral philosophy and criminal law.
— Douglas Husak, Professor of Philosophy and Law, Rutgers University
Richard Glen Boire is a ground breaker. He has a remarkable ability to see and elucidate linkages between such seemingly disparate topics as the Native American use of peyote, cutting edge ‘memory management’ medicines, literary theory, and constitutional law. These capacities invariably generate eloquent, provocative and persuasive examinations of whatever he turns his attention toward. Our culture desperately needs more scholarship like his, and students crave more ‘outside-the-box’ thinkers like Mr. Boire.
— Lester Grinspoon M.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
When it comes to opening new fields of research in the intersection of the law and social policy, Richard Glen Boire is one of the few people I have ever met who qualify as a true leader – both in ideas, and in putting those ideas into practice. His work with the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics has added an important new voice to the public debate about fundamental human rights; he has specifically worked to define the ever-muddier line where individual right ends and the prerogative of the State begins. In a few decades, lawyers and scholars will be citing his US Supreme Court amicus as a foundational element in the development of law in the area of cognitive liberties. In the place where science, psychology and the law meet, Richard Glen Boire is already there, has already surveyed the landscape, and has a raft of sensible, reasonable things to say. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Richard’s role – though it may be a generation before his enormous influence is widely recognized. But that influence is present now, and it already casts a substantial shadow over the legal arena of the 21st century.
— Mark Pesce, Author and Creator of VRML computer language
Richard Glen Boire, as a lawyer, independent scholar, and founder of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, has been a leading and authoritative voice in the growing debate over the rights to autonomy over one’s own neurochemistry. Whether considering the rights of children to reject Ritalin prescriptions ordered by school administrators, or the rights of native Americans to engage in thousand-year-old rituals, Boire’s inquiries are always insightful, informed, and relevant. His arguments to the higher courts have broken new ground in jurisprudence, and have no doubt served to frame these debates for decades to come. I would encourage any institution to give Boire the support he needs to pursue these issues in the context of pure research; no one is yet working effectively in this area – one that is becoming more of a public health issue and global ethical quandary every year.
— Douglas Rushkoff, Author, Professor of Communications New York University
Richard is a truly remarkable man! He is an outstanding scholar and teacher, among the crème de la crème of individuals with whom I have had the privilege to work (and I have worked with many outstanding individuals). His creativity, competence, passion, dedication, personableness, and kindness are of the highest order.
— David Presti, Department of Molecular & Cell Biology (Neurobiology), U.C. Berkeley
Richard Glen Boire offers a combination of intellect, creativity, vision and commitment to scholarship that one rarely encounters in any field.
— Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance
Additional References Upon Request