If, as Freudian theory teaches, we cannot attain genuine autonomy without comprehending our own inner psychologies, lawmakers interested in human liberty must consider how the legal system encourages or discourages self-reflection and expression that can lead to a better understanding of our own motives, desires, and values. The articles in this Symposium belong to a nascent movement in legal and philosophical scholarship, a movement marked by suspicion of oversimplification of human nature and underappreciation of the role that emotion plays in human life. The symposium contributors further this movement by utilizing theories of mind and substantive findings about human psychology in careful, contextual ways. They do not lock onto a particular movement in psychology or philosophy and assign it exclusive explanatory power or exclusive relevance to law. Nor are these authors unthinkingly essentialist about human nature.
None presumes that human beings think, feel, or act alike in every context.
Instead, the authors rely on fine-grained information and ideas about human subjectivity to explore the implications of that subjectivity for law and the related fields of ethics and epistemology. As a group, the articles in this Symposium on Law, Psychology, and the Emotions demonstrate that legal scholars and scholars in related fields can use psychological and philosophical theories of human mind and human nature unprogramatically, nondogmatically, and nonideologically. Taken together, their work demonstrates how empirically informed conceptions of human nature can enhance our understanding of how law is made and how it should be made, of what law is and what it should be. Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Particularly in the area of jury research, there is excellent legal scholarship incorporating the methods of psychology.