Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Legal Landscapes, and Form Reform: The Case of Diversion

Abstract

This essay, prepared for a therapeutic jurisprudence workshop at the Florida Coastal Law School, will be published in the Therapeutic Jurisprudence Review of the Florida Coastal Law Review. It discusses several therapeutic and antitherapeutic legal landscapes operative in diversion, sentencing, and corrections, such as sentence credit for presentence confinement, the relevance of post-offense and post-sentence rehabilitation on sentence imposition, and the absence of motivational power in the federal mechanism of supervised release. Finally, it discusses in detail the federal diversion program, and the pretrial diversion form and related procedures as detailed in the US Attorneys Manual. The essay concludes by conceptualizing the Manual as part of the federal "legal landscape" of interest to the field of therapeutic jurisprudence, and suggests "form reform" as an important new direction of scholarship.

Keywords: therapeutic jurisprudence, diversion, legal forms