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CONTENTS
CONTRIBUTORS VII
EDITORS’ PROLOGUE XIII
Stanley L. Brodsky and Thomas Grisso
1. The Evolution of Psychology and Law 1
Thomas Grisso
SECTION I Psychological Science and Law 29
2. Eyewitness Testimony: An Eyewitness Report 31
Elizabeth F. Loftus
3. Applying Social Psychology to Law and the Legal Process 44
Michael J. Saks
4. Jury Research 61
Shari Seidman Diamond
5. Mental Health Law and the Seeds of Therapeutic Jurisprudence 78
David B. Wexler
6. Mental Disability, Criminal Responsibility, and Civil Commitment 94
Stephen J. Morse
7. Framing, Institutionalizing, and Nurturing Research in Psychology and Law 109
Bruce D. Sales
SECTION II Assessment, Interventions, and Practice in Legal Contexts 125
8. Forensic Mental Health Services and Competence to Stand Trial 127
Ronald Roesch
9. Predictions of Violence 143
John Monahan
10. Developmental Psycholegal Capacities 158
Thomas Grisso
11. Correctional Psychology 178
Stanley L. Brodsky
12. The Founding and Early Years of the American Board of Forensic Psychology 195
Florence W. Kaslow
13. Community Psychology, Public Policy, and Children 207
N. Dickon Reppucci
EDITORS’ EPILOGUE 223
Thomas Grisso and Stanley L. Brodsky
INDEX 227
CONTRIBUTORS
Stanley L. Brodsky, PhD, is professor emeritus and scholar-in-residence at the University of Alabama, where he was a faculty member from 1972 to 2016. He previously was chief psychologist at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and was with the Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He was a founding member of the American Psychology–Law Society and has received the awards for Outstanding Achievement from the American Psychology–Law Society and the American Association of Correctional Psychologists. He is the editor or author of 15 books and over 250 articles, mostly in the area of psychology applied to the law.
Shari Seidman Diamond, PhD, JD, is Howard J. Trienens Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, where she heads the JD/PhD program, and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. She was president of the American Psychology–Law Society (1987–1988), editor of the Law & Society Review (1988–1991), and co-president of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (2010–2011). She received the American Psychological Association’s award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy (1991) and the Law and Society Association’s Harry Kalven Jr. award for Empirical Scholarship That Has Contributed Most Effectively to the Advancement of Research in Law and Society (2010). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012).
Thomas Grisso, PhD, is emeritus professor of psychiatry (clinical psychology) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Other primary academic appointments during his career included Ashland University (1969–1974) and Saint Louis University (1975–1987). He was president of the American Psychology–Law Society in 1990 and executive director of the American Board of Forensic Psychology from 2003 to 2017. He received the American Psychology–Law Society’s award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychology and Law (2012), American Psychological Association awards for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy (1994) and Contributions to Applied Research (2014), the American Psychiatric Association’s Isaac Ray Award (2005), and is an elected Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK).
Florence W. Kaslow, PhD, is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Psychology at Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida. Prior academic appointments include adjunct professor of medical psychology, Duke University Medical Center (1982–2004), and professor and co-director of the PsyD/JD program at Hahnemann Medical College and Villanova Law School (1973–1980). She was the founding and first president of the American Board of Forensic Psychology and American Academy of Forensic Psychology and is a recipient of many awards from American Psychological Association, American Psychological Foundation, and American Board of Professional Psychology. She is board certified in forensic, clinical, and couple and family psychology.
Elizabeth F. Loftus, PhD, is distinguished professor at the University of California–Irvine. She holds faculty positions in two departments: psychology and social behavior and criminology, law, and society. She received her PhD in psychology from Stanford University and was formerly on faculty at University of Washington. She has published 22 books, including the award-winning Eyewitness Testimony (5th ed. LexisNexis, 2013), and over 500 scientific articles. Loftus’s research of the last 40 years has focused on the malleability of human memory. She has been recognized for this research with seven honorary doctorates and election to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Philosophical Society, and the
National Academy of Sciences. She is past president of the Association for Psychological Science, the Western Psychological Association, and the American Psychology–Law Society
John Monahan, PhD, is the John Shannon Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where he is also a professor of psychology and of psychiatry. He was on the faculty at the University of California–Irvine, from 1972 to 1980. He was the president of the American Psychology-Law Society (1978) and the founding president of the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychology and Law (1981) receiving that organization’s Distinguished Contribution to Research in Public Policy Award. He also twice received the American Psychiatric Association’s Manfred Guttmacher (1982 and 2002) and Isaac Ray Awards (1996). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Stephen J. Morse, JD, PhD, is the Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and professor of psychology and law in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. Previously he was the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, professor of psychology and of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the University of Southern California. He was president of the American Psychology–Law Society (1981–1982) and was president of Division 41/American Psychology–Law Society (1986–1987). He received the American Academy of Forensic Psychology’s Distinguished Contribution to Forensic Psychology Award (1989) and the Isaac Ray Award from the American Psychiatric Association (2014) for distinguished contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychiatric aspects of jurisprudence
Nicholas Dickon Reppucci, PhD, is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Virginia Psychology Department. He was a lecturer at Harvard University (1967–1968), assistant and associate professor at Yale University (1968–1976) and professor at University of Virginia (1976–2017). He was president of Society for Community Research and Action (American Psychological Association’s Division of Community Psychology; 1987) and received its Award for Distinguished Scientific
and Theoretical Contributions (1998) and its Inaugural Award for Education and Training in Community Psychology (1999). He also received the American Psychology–Law Society’s Award for Outstanding Contibutions to Teaching and Mentoring (2007) and Society for Research in Adolescence’s Award for Outstanding Article on Adolescence and Social Policy (2008).
Ronald Roesch, PhD, is professor of psychology and director of the Mental Health, Law, and Policy Institute at Simon Fraser University. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois in 1977. He was president of the American Psychology–Law Society in 1994. He was editor-in-chief of Law and Human Behavior and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. Professor Roesch received the American Psychology–Law Society Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring in the Field of Psychology and Law Award in 2009 and its Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Psychology and Law Award in 2010. In 2011, he also received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Psychology and Law from the European Association of Psychology and Law.
Michael J. Saks, PhD, MSL, is regents professor at the Arizona State University where he is on the faculties of the law school and psychology department and an affiliated professor at the University of Haifa (Israel). Previously, he was a faculty member at the University of Iowa and Boston College and taught in the University of Virginia Law School’s LLM program for appellate judges. He was president of the American Psychology–Law Society (1989), and was the editor of Law and Human Behavior (1985–87). He received the American Psychological Association’s award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest (1987) and the American Psychology–Law Society’s Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law (2017).
Bruce D. Sales, PhD, JD, DSc(hc), is the Virginia L. Roberts Professor of Criminal Justice at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was previously a professor of psychology and law at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (1973–1981) and of psychology, sociology, psychiatry and law
at the University of Arizona (1981–2008). He was the first editor of the journals Law and Human Behavior and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. He is a life member of the American Law Institute and twice served as president of the American Psychology–Law Society (1976–1977, 1985–1986). He received the American Psychology–Law Society Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law (1992), and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Public Service for having “pioneered the development of psychology and law as a field of research, teaching, and practice” (1995).
David B. Wexler, JD, is professor of law, University of Puerto Rico, and distinguished research professor of law emeritus, University of Arizona. He served on the full-time law faculty of the University of Arizona from 1967 until 1997. He is an honorary president of the newly formed International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence (since 2017) and is honorary president of the Iberoamerican Association of Therapeutic Jurisprudence (since 2012). He is an honorary distinguished member of the American Psychology–Law Society (2010), received the Manfred Guttmacher Forensic Psychiatry Award of the American Psychiatric Association (1972), and, for his work on therapeutic jurisprudence, was awarded the Distinguished Service Award of the National Center for State Courts (2000).
EDITORS’ PROLOGUE
The impetus for this volume began several years ago. We recognized that the American Psychology–Law Society, inaugurated in 1969, would soon be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. We had witnessed the Society’s earliest years, and we found ourselves reflecting on the importance of capturing some of the essence of that formative time.
As an outgrowth of those reflections, we were among a group of senior scholars in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Psychology–Law Society in 2015, all of us speaking about how our careers developed and the personal and professional trajectory of our lives. The full and overflowing audience signaled a deep and not necessarily predictable interest in the lived history of psychology and law in North America.
After all, it is easy to be ahistorical. Everything else equal, scholars value the newest studies in our field. When we review manuscripts in which the references are 20 or 30 years old, we frequently view the submissions with a skeptical eye. We similarly value highly the newest editions of tests, the newest books, and the most recent articles. Yet, there are compelling reasons to look at our history. This book addresses how modern psychology and law began.
Psychology and law as a scholarly and professional field did not appear spontaneously and fully formed. The leaves and branches are visible, but the roots are the elements from which everything grew. Knowing and understanding the roots and how our own tree of knowledge grew tells a lot about who we are and where we came from.
The historical record of our field is skimpy. This edited volume is the first book on the history of the modern field of psychology and law. It offers new perspectives on the origins of modern psychology and law, as written by those who lived and created it.
Many students of the history of psychology know that psychology’s interaction with law emerged early in the 20th century. Yet that early start amounted to a premature fanfare after which the potential lay dormant for another 30 or 40 years.
The emergence of psychology and law as a modern field of scholarship was marked by the founding of the American Psychology–Law Society in 1969. The scientific foundation on which the modern field grew was established by a small group of psychological researchers, legal scholars, and clinicians who became widely known and respected. The contributors to this edited volume are among those groundbreakers. Their work led to the current burgeoning subfields and topics in psychology and law and forensic psychology. The contributors, appropriately considered among the founders of their field, are now nearing retirement yet are still remarkably vital, productive contributors to scholarly knowledge.
In a narrative voice, each of the contributors has described the key professional events in his or her career during the 1970s, the first decade of the American Psychology–Law Society. In some cases these events were their first major research studies using psychology applied to legal issues. In others, it was their development of seminal ideas, innovations, or experiences that had a later impact on the field’s development. They were in their thirties, there was no coherent field of psychology and law, and they were imitating no one. Their projects became cornerstones in the foundation of modern psychology and law.
Each contributor’s story covers a period of time, often just a decade or so, when the researcher developed the seminal effort that spawned subfields of research or gave birth to the organizational structure of the field. While telling their stories, they reflect on events and issues in U.S. law and policy in the 1960s and 1970s that stimulated their work, where they borrowed from then-current psychological science to further their efforts, and on their own needs, hopes, aspirations, and frustrations that drove them
forward at that point in their personal and professional development. The last portion of each chapter describes the later evolution, up to the present, of the field for which their earliest work provided a foundation.
The book begins with our chapter about the evolution of psychology and law research and of forensic–clinical interactions with law. Starting with brief observations about early 20th-century interactions between psychology and law, it describes the conditions in which psychology and law took root in the 1970s when the 12 chapter authors were developing the field. It continues with a description of the enormous contributions of the American Psychology–Law Society in those early years, as well as the successes, conflicts, and challenges that arose as the Society matured into the 21st century. This is followed by our 12 contributors’ chapters, arranged in two broad areas: (a) psychological science and law, and (b) assessment, interventions and practice in legal contexts.
By almost any measure the persons who have authored those chapters are among the early leaders in psychology and law. There were certainly others, and all 12 authors acknowledge and identify those who were beginning to do work similar to theirs during the 1970s. Enlisting these specific authors for this task was guided in part by our effort to represent the scope of topics that arose in the 1970s and to achieve balance by minimizing repetition across the whole enterprise. The social psychology of the law: check. Violence prediction: check. Memory: check. Professional credentialing: check. Juveniles: check. Community psychology: check. Mental disability law: check. And much more.
The last thing we wanted was for this book to be a dry, tired, and difficult read that covered ground already well-trodden. For that reason, we asked the authors of the chapters to write about their personal journeys. When occasionally we received a draft that was light on personal reflections, we asked them to reveal more about their own odysseys. And they did it, much more than we expected. We learned new things about people we have known for four decades. Who knew that John Monahan started out in a seminary? Or that so many barriers impeded the paths of our contributors?
The contributions fascinated us. At moments, we felt like leaping and clicking our heels, if clicking our heels were still within our modest leaping repertoires. We smiled. We often were moved. For the first time in one place, the life stories have been gathered of the people and the work that has shaped so much of psychology and law.
We truly did not know just what to expect in response to our invitations to the authors. The replies and chapters went well beyond our hopes. The process fit into the Japanese Zen notion of mu, in which the context of the question was too small for the breadth and truth of the answer.
In light of Beth Loftus’s body of work on the malleability of memory, it is perhaps reasonable to ask whether these recollections and memories of the development of psychology and law are accurate. As exemplary as our contributors are, decades have gone by. We had asked everyone to go back to the 1970s and to trace where they were and how their paths led to where they are now. Are the memories dependable and accurate?
To one way of thinking, it may not make a difference. There are many articles and a book with similar themes asserting that there is no such thing as nonfiction (Brock, 2011; Kilgore, 2010). Tom Waits has declared that nonfiction does not exist (Maher, 2011, p. 424). Norman Mailer, in an award address, said that everything written is fiction, because the reality of any given moment is impossible to describe. Instead, he encouraged writers to aim to come close to what happened. In his chapter “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” Hayden White (2002) takes a more philosophical position, claiming that authors endow nonfiction stories with their own meanings and life metaphors and always offer biased details (p. 201).
E. L Doctorow (1988) argued in a New York Times book review much the same conclusion, “There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”
All of us have had the experience of sharing memories of events with a person who was there, only to find that some element or statement of outcome was differently recalled. Yet a form of fact-checking is in place. These recollections are supported by references and publications or are narrated in considerable detail. We are excited to share them.
REFERENCES
Brock, M. (2011). There’s no such thing as a nonfiction novel! Retrieved from https:// marciebrockbookmarketingmaven.wordpress.com/ 2011/ 08/ 06/ theresno-such-thing-as-a-nonfiction-novel/ Doctorow, E. L. (1988). New York Times Book Review, January 27, 1988. Kilgore, C. (2010). There’s no such thing as non-fiction. Morrisville, NC: Lulu. Maher, P. (2011). Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and encounters. Chicago: Chicago Review.
White, H. (2002). The historical text as literary artifact. In H. Richardson (Ed.), Narrative dynamics: Essays on time, plot, closure, and frames. Columbus. OH: Ohio State University Press.
The Evolution of Psychology and Law
THOMAS GRISSO
The 50th anniversary of the American Psychology–Law Society (AP–LS) in 2019 will occur about 110 years after Munsterberg’s (1908) treatise on psychology’s potential for application to legal issues. Munsterberg’s overture was soundly rejected as premature by legal scholars of the time (Wigmore, 1909). Yet in the intervening years, the success of an applied science called psychology and law has been remarkable in its influence on the law, legal systems and procedures, and the provision of evidence in legal cases.
This chapter examines how the field of psychology and law evolved. This account does not describe fully what psychology and law is or what it has achieved. That can be found in psychology and law textbooks, more detailed histories (e.g., Bartol & Bartol, 2015; Brigham & Grisso, 2003), and in each of the other 12 chapters in this book. In contrast, the present chapter focuses on the important motives, forces, and social conditions
that influenced how the field grew. It also examines the role of the AP–LS as one of the major forces in psychology and law’s development. The evolution of the field seems to divide naturally into three major eras. The first two, the birth of legal psychology (1890–1930) and a dormant era (1930–1960), are described briefly. The chapter attends primarily to the third, modern era of psychology and law that blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to mature.
THE EARLY ROOTS OF PSYCHOLOGY AND LAW
Before psychology and law as we know it came on the scene, legal psychology had flourished for about 30 years early in the 20th century and then slumbered for another 30 years. Some of that history is relevant for understanding the modern era.
The Legal Psychology Era (1890–1930)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, laboratories like that of Wilhelm Wundt’s began building a basic science of human behavior—mapping, classifying, and determining the structural and functional boundaries of memory, perception, sensation, and motor reactions. As basic data and principles emerged, Wundt’s students began identifying how the principles might have practical use in business, military affairs, education, advertising, public health, and, of course, law.
The earliest descriptions of psychology’s potential for application to law were largely speculative. For example, Munsterberg’s (1908) treatise, On the Witness Stand, mostly contained visionary hypotheses. Some researchers took the next step, performing studies that used basic lab findings to predict behavior in experimental situations that approximated the circumstances of legal cases (e.g., Benussi, 1914; Marston, 1917; Stern, 1906, 1910). An early review by Slesinger and Pilpel (1929) found 11 of these hypothesis-testing articles pertaining to psychology of
eyewitness testimony and 10 reports of applied studies for detection of deception, although there were many more on other topics (as reviewed by Burtt, 1931).
There is no record of an organized affiliation or association of psychologists engaged in those earliest studies. Indeed, the young, eager researchers who first explored psychology’s applications to law seemed not to identify themselves as “forensic” or “legal” psychologists. They were simply applied psychologists. Any one of them was likely to be examining applications to industry, advertising, education, or the military at the same time.
A few of these applied psychologists, however, did come close to identifying legal psychology as their primary specialty. For example, William Marston obtained both a law degree and a PhD in psychology at Harvard in 1921 (studying with Munsterberg). He joined the faculty at American University in 1922 in what is believed to be the first position entitled “Professor of Legal Psychology” (Heilbrun, Grisso, & Goldstein, 2009). He studied errors in eyewitness accounts (Marston, 1924) and polygraphic detection of deception (Marston, 1917), testimony on the latter making him the focus of the Frye v. United States (1923) decision (Weiss, Watson, & Xuan, 2014).1 Others were William Healy (a psychologically minded neurologist) and Grace Fernald (a psychologist). Together they founded the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in 1909 to serve the first juvenile court in the United States (Cook County, Chicago, opened in 1899; Schetky & Benedek, 1992). This was the first court-related psychological clinic on record, breaking ground with comprehensive “studies of the child” to assist the court in dispositional decisions (Healy, 1915) and creating the first specialized psychological tests to evaluate delinquent youth (Domino & Domino, 2006).
Harold Burtt produced a book, Legal Psychology (Burtt, 1931) that best summarizes how far the field had come in its first 30 years. Born in 1890, Burtt trained with Munsterberg at Harvard and served in World
1. Even Marston, though, had other applied interests, including his consultation to an educational publishing company, leading to his invention of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman (Lepore, 2014).
War I to apply psychology to the war effort. After the war he joined the faculty at Ohio State University in 1919.2 His contributions were diverse including early attempts to select aviators, to detect lies and other forms of deception, to enhance advertising effectiveness, to avoid copyright/trademark infringement, and to improve street lighting (“Obituary,” 1992). He was one of the founders in 1938 of the American Association for Applied Psychology, which broke away from the American Psychological Association (APA) because of APA’s perceived lack of support or attention to applied psychology.
Burtt’s Legal Psychology was a major work of 459 pages with 19 chapters. If the chapters had been clustered, their sections almost could serve as the outline for a modern text in psychology and law (e.g., four chapters on witness accuracy and testimony, two on court procedures and jury decision making, two on psychopathology and crime). Munsterberg’s (1908) more famous book was actually a collection of previously published magazine articles largely without scholarly citations (Grisso & Brigham, 2013). In contrast, Burtt thoroughly referenced an impressive number and range of basic and applied studies from many labs, describing them in great detail together with published tables and graphs illustrating their results. He also cited over 120 legal cases, using their facts to illustrate psychology’s relevance for law and legal process.
Taking note of what was not in Burtt’s book provides some insight into the broader social context in which early legal psychology was evolving and how different that context was when compared to the rise of modern psychology and law in the 1970s. First, this new field appeared to have no interest in the parallel rise of forensic psychiatry. Isaac Ray, Bleuler and Kraepelin, Freud’s and Jung’s forays into legal questions, the relevance of mental disorder for criminal responsibility—none of that appeared in Burtt’s Legal Psychology. Burtt seemed to presume that when legal psychology evolved a bit further, it would offer the law something entirely
2. Burtt’s career actually spanned the years between Munsterberg and the modern era of psychology and law. He chaired the Psychology Department at Ohio State University until he retired in 1960. He died at age 101 in 1991, when the AP–LS was about 20 years old.
different than psychiatry and more far-reaching in “value to those who are interested in furthering justice and improving society” (Burtt, 1931, p. 459).
Second, the book suggests that “furthering justice and improving society” in those days had a different meaning than when modern psychology and law emerged in the 1970s. Burtt’s book offers little research directed specifically at concerns about human rights or civil liberties, sometimes encouraging deprivation of rights of people with disabilities for their own and society’s benefit. Early legal psychology reflected the times in which it evolved. Racial discrimination (Plessy v. Ferguson’s 1896 separatebut-equal policy) and sterilization of persons with hereditary intellectual impairments (Buck v. Bell, 1927) were constitutional.3 Some leaders in biological science (e.g., Davenport, 1928) and applied sciences (e.g., Alexander Graham Bell, 1914) were promoting the eugenics movement to reduce the burden of “mental defectives” on society and to purify the nation’s population. Burtt’s chapter on heredity, character, and intelligence interpreted research to favor the eugenics movement, offering little evidence of discomfort regarding human rights.4
Finally, absent from Burtt’s book were Munsterberg’s (1908) uncompromising conclusions that psychologists had all the answers and lawyers were simply too stubborn to listen to them (Grisso & Brigham, 2013). In contrast, Burtt cautioned both lawyers and psychologists that “legal psychology is not a well-organized body of knowledge” (Burtt, 1931, p. 459), although certain areas had “nearly reached the stage” (p. 448) when they could qualify as evidence in legal cases. Legal psychology was poised to fulfill its potential.
3. The court in Buck v. Bell explained: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . three generations of imbeciles is enough” (Buck v. Bell, 1927).
4. The United States was not alone in the use of applied psychology to promote such policies. Applied psychologists in South Africa were interpreting their research to support a racially separated social system. In the 1950s, this led to the government’s formal apartheid policies drafted by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, an applied psychologist trained in pre-Nazi Germany.
The Dormant Era (1930–1960)
Then nothing happened. Writing early in the modern era, June Louin Tapp (1976, p. 361) observed with puzzlement that after the 1930s: “Not until the late 1960s was the exchange between psychologists and lawyers on matters of justice and law anything more than sparse and sporadic.” Tapp did not try to explain the hiatus, but several circumstances offer grounds for reasonable speculation. Moreover, much did happen that eventually would shape psychology and law when it blossomed in the third era.
One could blame Munsterberg’s (1908) book and Wigmore’s (1909) scathing response for legal psychology’s failure take hold (Bersoff, 1999). Yet it was also likely that the law was not ready for psychology. While critiquing Munsterberg, Wigmore also chastised his own colleagues for taking so little interest in using what the sciences produced. During the 1920s and 1930s, the legal world was debating legal realism (e.g., Frank, 1930). Skepticism and disagreement surrounded the notion that scientific evidence about social implications of legal decisions should have a role in shaping judicial thinking. Also, at that time psychology, relative to psychiatry, had little legal standing as a profession for expert testimony on legal issues and mental disorder. In fact, clinical psychology as we know it barely existed (Compas & Gotlib, 2002). Finally, World War II offered great opportunities and demands for applying psychology to personnel selection, communications, and improving instrument panels for aircraft and other weapons. These alternatives may have contributed to a waning of applied psychologists’ attention to applications in law.
While little was happening in legal psychology scholarship during the dormant years, two specialties in psychology—social and clinical—were developing in ways that set the stage for modern psychology and law. In the late 1930s, social psychology was beginning to do what Kurt Lewin called “action research”: psychological studies in quasi-naturalistic settings that could bear on contemporary social problems and promote social change (Adelman, 1993). Thus arose a group devoted to policy-relevant research, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (Krech & Cartwright, 1956). Society members went beyond the laboratory to issue
their own statements on political issues of the World War II era. At first antiwar, later they used their group-behavior research to demonstrate the destructive effects of totalitarian social systems. Postwar research of this type set the stage for a focus on policy-relevant research and human rights that would be a central motivation for psychology and law in the third era.
The dormant era also saw the formal recognition of clinical psychology. Psychologists were developing a new generation of psychological tests, including tests of psychopathology (e.g., MMPI; Hathaway & McKinley, 1942). The war created demands for treatment of soldiers that exceeded the capacity of the psychiatric workforce, offering opportunities for psychologists to take on new diagnostic and psychotherapeutic roles in medical and psychiatric settings (Benjamin, 2005; Watson, 1953). Between 1945 and 1950, the new field of clinical psychology acquired its own APA division, a Journal of Clinical Psychology, the development of the American Board of Professional Psychology in 1947 (Watson, 1953) and, in the 1950s, the first formal university programs in clinical psychology (Compas & Gotlib, 2002).
During the 1950s, clinical psychologists’ new recognition led to an increase in their involvement in correctional settings (Bartol & Freeman, 2005; see Brodsky, this volume) and as experts in legal cases in which personality or mental disorder were the focus of civil and criminal litigation (Greenburg, 1956; Loh, 1981). The 1950s also brought an uptick in experimental, social, and developmental psychological testimony, marked notably by Kenneth Clark’s appearance in Brown v. Board of Education (1954; which ruled that school racial segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment). Yet the law clearly had not thrown open the door. As described at that time, “An important problem in psychology today is the legal status of the psychologist and his relationship to the courts. . . . The use of the [psychological] expert witness is a fairly modern innovation in the field of legal evidence” (McCary, 1956, p. 8).
Legal psychology may have advanced little in the dormant era. Yet the development of clinical and social psychology would play a key role in the field’s reawakening.
