12-04-22: If It Bleads, It Leads Media-Terrorism Connection: Whores of Court Encl.

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WHORES OF T H E COURT

tion, oppression, and powerlessness. She will remain trapped in the impotent exercise of railing against fate, and she will inevitably trap her clients in the same flailing state. Both types of clinicians, however, do very well financially with today's miscegenation between law and psychology-a relationship as inevitable as the confluence of two rivers running into the same valley. VENALITY, PERJURY, A N D BAMBOOZLING There are approximately 850,000 lawyers in the United States, with about 40,000 new ones being hatched out of our law schools each year. T h e ratio of lawyers to the general population today is twice its historical average. Lawyers have to eat. Lawyers have to pay the mortgage, club dues, and greens fees. Psychologically hyped cases are a gift from heaven-or from the state and federal legislatures controlled by lawyers. Psychologists have to eat too. Psychology, like law, has been a growth industry over the last three decades, with an exponential increase in numbers of Ph.D.s, and n/l.D.s in psychiatry, as well as in numbers of graduates in social work and counseling increasing tenfold since the mental health initiative launched by the federal government under President Kennedy's administration. With less cynicism, I should note that various legal scholars like Wallace Loh and Laura Kalman point out the vital importance of the legal realist movement in this country from the 1920s to the 1960s in effecting diametrical changes-in a significant number of minds-in the conceptualization of the interactions between law and politics. That such changes would create a natural receptivity to the arguments of the socially concerned and proactive psychologists was inevitable. Legal history is considerably outside the scope of any expertise I might claim, but the interested reader is referred to the work by Kalman (1996) in the reference section. Attorneys' and psychologists' common interest in forensic psychological issues and assessments has spawned a number of organizations devoted to the practice and development of the area at the nexus of law and psychology. T h e American Psychological Association has a special division of its membership open to both psychologists and lawyers, and both groups of practitioners have swelled the ranks of the American Psychology-Law Society, active since the mid-1970s.


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