Therapeutic Jurisprudence - History

History

In the early 90’s, legal scholars began to use it when discussing mental health law, including Wexler and Winick's 1991 book, Essays in Therapeutic Jurisprudence. The TJ Approach soon spread beyond mental health law to include TJ work in criminal law, family and juvenile law, health law, tort law, contracts and commercial law, trusts and estates law, disability law, constitutional law, evidence law, and legal profession. In short, TJ became a mental health approach to law generally, and these advances were documented in Wexler and Winick's 1996 book, Law in a Therapeutic Key: Developments in Therapeutic Jurisprudence. See David B. Wexler, The Development of Therapeutic Jurisprudence: From Theory to Practice, 68 Revista Juridica Universidad de Puerto Rico 691-705(1999).

The approach was soon applied to the way various legal actors--judges, lawyers, police officers, and expert witnesses--play their roles, suggesting ways of doing so that would diminish unintended antitherapeutic consequences and increase the psychological well-being of those who come into contact with these legal figures. In 1999 in a Notre Dame Law Review article (Hora, Schma and Rosenthal, “Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Drug Treatment Court Movement: Revolutionizing the Criminal Justice System’s Response to Drug Abuse and Crime in America,” 74 NDLR 439 (1999),) TJ was applied to drug treatment courts (DTC) drug court for the first time and the authors asserted that DTCs were TJ in action and that TJ provided the jurisprudential underpinnings of DTCs. TJ has emerged as the theoretical foundation for the increasing number of "problem-solving courts" that have transformed the role of the judiciary. These include, in addition to DTCs, domestic violence courts, mental health courts, re-entry courts, teen courts, and community courts. Winick and Wexler described this new judicial model and demonstrated how principles of TJ can be used by the judges in these new courts in their 2003 book, Judging in a Therapeutic Key: Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Courts.