Law Commons^™

Foreword: Law, Psychology, And The Emotions, Heidi Li Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Given that law is made by and for people, the relatively little attention lawyers, judges, and legal scholars have paid to human psychology is surprising. Too often, legal writers have either presupposed or borrowed impoverished conceptions of human nature, erecting legal theories for people presumptively possessed of the requisite nature, regardless of the psychology of the actual persons who make and live under the law. Even when they do attend to human nature, legal scholars tend to ignore the centrality of emotions, dispositions, fantasies, and wishes to human psychology. The articles in this Symposium are united by their authors' resistance …