To work effectively with clients, witnesses, judges, mediators,
arbitrators, experts, jurors, and other lawyers, attorneys must
have a good understanding of how people think and make
decisions, and must possess good people skills. Yet, law schools
have tended to teach very little, directly, about human
behavior, and current critiques of legal education do not focus
on the importance of psychological insights to attorneys. In
particular, lawyers and legal education have not taken full
advantage of the great strides that have been made in the field
of scientific psychology in recent decades. Similarly,
psychologists are not doing as much as they might to apply their
discipline to all aspects of law. Law and psychology texts and
courses often focus primarily on criminal rather than civil law
and practice, and place their emphasis on the psychology of
juries, eyewitness testimony, interrogation, and trials. This
Article begins to fill some of the gaps that exist in the
application of psychology to legal practice,