Psychology and Law

Andreas Kapardis

Law, one of the oldest academic disciplines, plays an important role in our everyday life. Much of what law does influences people to conform to various rules, although sometimes that influence is imperceptible. The numerous laws in society do not, of course, only play an important role in regulating human behavior but, also, provide mechanisms and procedures for resolving disputes. For its part, psychology as a scientific discipline has a long past but a short history—just more than a hundred years—and, generally speaking, is concerned with studying the way people behave and experience the world around them. The area of research and practice at the interface between psychology and law, which scholars sometimes call legal psychology, is itself more than 100 years old and has addressed a broad range of issues. Researchers divide legal psychology into a number of subfields. Psychology in law investigates, for example, the reliability of eyewitness ...

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