The Roots of Modern Psychology and Law is a collection of stories about the rise of psychology and law in postwar America. Psychologists Thomas Grisso and Stanley L. Brodksy, who served as editors of the collection, expertly arranged the stories into a simple but compelling format. They gave twelve psychology and law luminaries one chapter each to tell their version of events, discussing where they were when these two fields began to interact in the modern era and the role they playd in bringing the fields together.
The result is an engaging 221-page narrative history in which each chapter author gives a first-person account of how their career influenced, and was influenced by, the psychology and law movement. Chapter authors explain the rise of subfields, including jury research, therapeutic jurisprudence, and predictions of violence, with candor and simplicity.
Drs. Grisso and Stanley made another interesting editorial choice. They arranged the chapters by subject instead of chronology. The first six chapters cover psychological science and the law (eyewitness testimony, civil commitment, mental health law), while the last six are more practice-based (correctional psychology, psycholegal capacity, community psychology).
Broadly speaking, the advent of the American Psychology and Law Society (AP-LS) in 1971 serves as a launch point for each author's account. The stories then march on into the present day. In this way, the same historical period is described in each of the twelve chapters. The result of this approach depends on the reader. For those familiar with the history of modern psychology and law, the chapters will feel like victory laps. Novices will appreciate the repetition of names, dates, and key events.
Dr. Grisso authors the first chapter, titled “The Evolution of Psychology and Law.” In an academic, third-person voice that distinguishes it from the rest of the book, Dr. Grisso recounts the history of how these two fields merged. He starts in the late 1890s with the birth of legal psychology, presses on through the dormant period (1930-1960), and arrives in the modern era (1960s onward). It is an excellent historical primer for the following twelve chapters. In fact, it is almost too good; if this book were a history of modern psychology and law, Dr. Grisso reveals the whole plot before the book begins.
But it isn't a history book in the traditional sense. Since this book is a narrative history, the what and when matter only in the context of who and why. And in this collection, the chapter authors supply richly detailed answers to those who and why questions. We learn about friendships, marriages, and eureka moments. We learn the root of eureka itself, and we learn about the diligence those moments of discovery required.
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, the chapter author on eyewitness testimony, “lived and breathed” semantic memory after finishing her PhD at Stanford (p 33). “But,” she writes, “I wanted to do research that had more obvious social relevance” (p 33). She considered her latent “personal interest in legal cases” and resolved to study the memory of witnesses to crimes (p 33). Not long after, she secured funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study accident witnesses. This led to another eureka moment. Leading questions, she discovered, could “contaminate memory” (p 34). After she published her findings in a 1974 Psychology Today article, “… my phone was ringing off the hook … I began to consult on legal cases and to appear in courtrooms as an expert witness…” (p 35).
We also learn about historical, systemic injustice in American mental health care. Sadly, decades of dogma that minimized patients' rights cemented the barriers to progress sought by each author. In “Correctional Psychology,” Dr. Brodsky describes his early encounters with locked facilities. “I was alone on the 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM shift prior to the days of psychotropic drugs …Every hour, as in-structed, I pulled out my ring of skeleton keys … and ran a key along the bottom of the bare feet of patients to see if they were alive” (p 179).
Change was slow to come. Five years after Judge Frank M. Johnson of the Middle District of Alabama found correctional facilities of Alabama to be “constitutionally barbaric” in 1971, Dr. Brodsky's attempts to address correctional psychology were met with “an openly hostile and resistant prison system” (p 186).
One author reveals his own brush with the legal system and how it shaped his career. In “Forensic Mental Health Services and Competence to Stand Trial,” Dr. Ronald Roesch writes about the time he broke into a golf course and stole golf clubs. The judge considered Roesch's academic record and lack of prior offenses and sentenced the 19-year-old to probation. “Here,” Dr. Roesch writes, “was an example of diversion before diversion was common … Judge Gooding's diversion decision set me on a career path in psychology and law in which I have tried to create similar opportunities for others…” (p 128).
If the founding of the AP-LS in 1974 acts as the book's historical anchor, then Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962 and the concurrent wave of social justice movements serve as its moral anchor. Indeed, the desire to create a more equitable future is echoed throughout the book. For example, in “Applying Social Psychology to the Law and the Legal Process,” Dr. Michael J. Saks writes, “I was eager to deploy psychology's discovered phenomena, theories, and research methods in the service of helping to make the world better through psychology” (p 46).
As an example of that deployment, Dr. Saks describes a legal case in which key evidence hinged on the analysis of a “handwriting examiner” (p 52). While working on the case, he discovered that there was no evidence to suggest one could be an expert at identifying handwriting in the first place. To wit, Dr. Saks helped reveal “the larger problem of a forensic science that had no science and no data undergirding it …” (p 52). He cites the advent of DNA typing, and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), which raised the barrier of admissibility of expert evidence from consensus within a field to demonstrated validity, as key developments in the scientific reformation of forensic science. The scholarly momentum that drove such developments was due in no small part to researchers like Dr. Saks and the rest of the chapter authors.
In sum, The Roots of Modern Psychology and Law offers a novel approach to modern psycholegal history. It situates the reader in many contexts (social, moral, personal) without sacrificing readability. It is erudite but also heartfelt. It makes a powerful case for the narrative history model, and it is a must-read for those interested in the sample intersection of psychology and law.
Footnotes
Disclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: None.
- © 2021 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
