Abstract

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 to unrealistic or incomplete theories of human nature. Whether they rely on developed social science or more speculative theories of the mind, or a combination of the two, each author portrays human actors in complex psychological terms and discusses the implications for law, legal theory, moral theory, or some combination of these. After reading the collection of articles presented here, the reader will, I hope, see how scholars, lawyers, judges, and policymakers can work toward law that comprehends and accepts the complexity of human psychology.