Jurisprudence and Psychology

I argue that much of the work in analytic jurisprudence has been concerned with two questions that have not been adequately distinguished: (a) an inquiry about the concept of law, and (b) an explanation of the important features of the practice of law. It is often assumed that the two inquiries are the same. In this essay I distinguish the two and argue that work in psychology provides important insights about both. With regard to the first, I argue that much jurisprudential conceptual analysis is challenged by psychological work on concepts. With regard to the second, I argue that legal theorists would benefit from greater attention to what people’s ‘internal’ attitudes about law are by looking at psychological research on the matter. But psychology is not merely a challenge to contemporary jurisprudence: following the critique I suggest various ways psychological work can assist us in thinking on old jurisprudential questions like the dispute between positivism and natural law or the question of law’s normativity