During the 20th century, a series of jurisprudential movements arose within the United States that challenged or explored underlying premises of law and legal decision-making. The legal realism movement of the 1920s and 1930s is widely recognized as the progenitor of these eorts. Legal realism argued that law is not merely a matter of syllogisms and logic, but is shaped by underlying political, economic, and social forces. Now widely accepted, legal realism has been followed by a number of movements that apply many of its principles. These include the law and society movement, law and economics, critical legal studies, feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, social science in law, and law and psychology (Finkelman & Grisso, 1996;Winick, 1996). What these movements generally share is an assertion that traditional legal analysis fails to incorporate important perspectives and that the incorporation of these perspectives will result in better legal decision-making.
A jurisprudential movement that has emerged in the past decade, therapeutic jurisprudence, similarly identi®es a perspective allegedly overlooked or neglected, namely, that the law can function as a therapeutic agent. Downplaying the importance of ``doctrinal analysis,'' therapeutic jurisprudence proponents focus on the therapeutic or antitherapeutic consequences of the law and propose that social science research be used to study the extent to which the law promotes the psychological or physical well-being of the people it aects (Slobogin, 1996;Wexler, 1996a).
At the same time, therapeutic jurisprudence works with a broad brush in that the ``law'' is viewed as encompassing legal rules, legal procedures, and the roles of legal