The Infant and the Dream: Psychology and the Law

Abstract

When a new law school is established, like my own at the University of East Anglia, a common question asked is, ‘how will you be different?’ One response is to emphasise the scope for interdisciplinary studies. Instead of a closed shop of lawyers talking to each other, philosophers, sociologists, environmentalists, linguists and so forth will cooperate. But lawyers do not often go into partnership with psychologists, and indeed at my own university there is no department of psychology although one is now being set up.

I have reconsidered this paper in the light of the papers read, and the comments I received, at the Oxford seminar. I am particularly grateful to Joanna Shapland and Phil Sealy for their criticism and advice. But I expect many psychologists still won’t recognise their activities in what I have written. I can only testify that increasing familiary with their work breeds respect.

The title of this piece is taken from a remark made by Zangwill in 1950 and cited by Joynson twenty years later: ‘As yet, the scientific study of personality is in its infancy, and social psychology remains a dream rather than an accepted discipline’. (Joynson, 1974, p. 14).