The jurisprudence of therapeutic jurisprudence.

In less than a decade, therapeutic jurisprudence, which began as a scholarly approach to mental health law, has emerged as a mental health approach to law generally. In this essay, one of the founders of this new field offers a further elaboration of the theory of therapeutic jurisprudence and a response to the key issues raised by commentators and critics. This essay discusses the relationship between therapeutic jurisprudence and other schools of jurisprudence and analyzes the approach's normative focus and its limits. It also addresses how “therapeutic” should be defined, whether the approach is paternalistic, whether the limits of social science methodology doom the enterprise, how therapeutic and other potentially conflicting values can be reconciled, and how the law should respond when such conflicts persist. Finally, the essay charts the path of therapeutic jurisprudence and analyzes new developments in the field.