Psychology and the law: The critical agenda for citizen justice and radical social change

Many observers have noted that the law-psychology movement has mostly failed to meet its objectives of producing social change in any radical or otherwise substantial way. One explanation for these disappointing results is that no systematic and thorough attempt has been made to explain what the radical agenda embodies, especially in relation to identifying its core assumptions. Relying on several insights developed within critical theory and appropriated by scholars of radical law-psychology, this article describes four cutting-edge approaches to contemporary psycholegal inquiry: political economy, feminist jurisprudence, anarchism, and postmodernism. Individually, these orientations provide a clearer portrait of what radical scholarship has come to represent. Collectively, they suggest a new and much-needed direction in law-psychology research, especially in relation to advancing the aims of justice in the legal sphere. This article concludes by tentatively discussing the implications of the critically informed law-psychology approach for future theoretical and applied analyses in the field.