Therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) is a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective that focuses on the law’s impact on the emotional and psychological health of everyone it touches — clients, lawyers, and judges alike. TJ asks lawyers to listen with awareness of the psychological and emotional issues surrounding a matter, including stress, confidence, and trust, and to consider whether the legal system, as it operates, is having a therapeutic or an antitherapeutic effect on the people inside it. It touches almost every practice area: estate lawyers can help clients face the emotional realities of aging and death; employment lawyers can help employers relate well to employees; trial lawyers can weigh the emotional cost of litigation itself.

Bruce Winick, who co-founded the field with David Wexler in the late 1980s, traced its origin to their shared work in mental health law: “It was a very simple notion: the law, whether we know it or not, has inevitable effects on people’s emotional well-being. Let’s understand law in that regard. Let’s look at law in action, not just in the books… We can’t just see law as a sort of cardboard cutout. It’s not that. It’s real people. It’s how that law plays out in the lives of people.” Winick had already spent his early career successfully challenging the electric chair in New York and suing the Selective Service System before he realized his real calling was lawyering in the public interest — modeling for his students, he said, that “money isn’t everything. It’s about doing good works, it’s about serving your client, it’s about participating in the political process.”

In practice, TJ can be as simple as a lawyer choosing to bring compassion and full presence into a hard moment with a client. One employment lawyer who represents victims of workplace harassment has described watching a client find her own strength and confidence simply by being supported through a difficult deposition — proof, in that lawyer’s words, that a lawyer can “go into every case knowing and trusting that healing can be possible.”

A collaborative divorce is seen as a less traumatic, divisive option to the traditionally adversarial framework. A TJ proponent would draw attention to the negative aspects of acrimonious legal procedures and suggest alternatives and more therapeutic ways of achieving an agreeable resolution.

Therapeutic jurisprudence also works to reframe the roles or behaviors of judges and lawyers. It envisions lawyers practicing with an ethic of care and heightened interpersonal skills, who value the psychological wellbeing of their clients as well as their legal rights and interests, and to actively seek to prevent legal problems through creative drafting and problem-solving. 

Similarly, a judge familiar with TJ may ask the person being sentenced to draft a plan that explains why he or she deserves a certain sentence and how he or she will be able to comply with the terms. Such techniques are believed to encourage people to take responsibility for their own rehabilitation.

Perhaps the most famous application of Therapeutic Jurisprudence is the problem-solving court, but the two aren’t the same thing. The first drug courts, which opened in the late 1980s, grew out of judges’ frustration with a revolving door, not out of TJ scholarship. The TJ scholars soon saw what these courts were doing and they recognized their own ideas in action. Each gave the other something: the courts gained a theory to explain their work, and TJ gained a real-world proving ground. David Wexler describes TJ as the “wine” and legal structures as the “bottles.” Problem-solving courts are one bottle, but the wine can be poured into any courtroom, law office, or legal process where people’s wellbeing is at stake. (For more on how these courts work, see our page on problem-solving courts.)