Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Enhancing the Relationship between Law and Psychology

Abstract

Therapeutic jurisprudence embodies a psychological approach to law - one that applies the insights and principles of psychology to the examination of legal rules and practices and to their improvement. It provides a new focus for law and psychology scholarship, identifying a variety of issues in need of theoretical and empirical examination Law reform is an important theme of therapeutic jurisprudence, and scholars applying the approach have succeeded in offering an enormous range of proposals for legal change in a wide variety of legal contexts. In addition, therapeutic jurisprudence identifies a number of new roles and contexts for clinical psychologists working in the legal system.

This chapter illustrates the growing impact of therapeutic jurisprudence on the field of law and psychology. It then illustrates how therapeutic jurisprudence can be used to map a new research agenda for law and psychology scholarship that would be highly useful for the legal system. Empirical work examining the therapeutic consequences of legal arrangements and therapeutic jurisprudence reform proposals has begun to emerge, but the extent of such work still remains disappointingly small. This chapter is designed to help research psychologists and other social scientists to understand better the potential of therapeutic jurisprudence for identifying important questions for empirical investigation.