Law as a Healing Profession: The 'Comprehensive Law Movement'

Abstract

Beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century, partially in response to widespread dissatisfaction within the legal system and among lawyers, a new movement in law emerged. This movement takes an explicitly comprehensive, integrated, humanistic, interdisciplinary, restorative, and often therapeutic approach to law and lawyering. It is the result of a synthesis of a number of new disciplines within law and legal practice that have been rapidly gaining visibility, acceptance, and popularity in the last decade and a half. These disciplines represent a number of emerging, new, or alternative forms of law practice, dispute resolution, and criminal justice. The converging main "vectors" of this movement are (1) collaborative law, (2) creative problem solving, (3) holistic justice, (4) preventive law, (5) problem solving courts, (6) procedural justice, (7) restorative justice, (8) therapeutic jurisprudence, and (9) transformative mediation.

Keywords: comprehensive law, law, legal profession