Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1969

Publication Information

55 Iowa L. Rev. 376 (1969-1970)

Abstract

Most lawyers would like to know more about how clients feel in law-office encounters with death, property, and giving. The immediate source of experience and information should be psychology-research psychology as well as therapeutic psychology. However, psychology has not concerned itself with the substance of the law; what is usually called "law and psychology" as an interdisciplinary area of study is confined to border areas-insanity as a criminal defense, testamentary capacity, civil commitment to mental institutions. The task of developing psychological models which reach the substance of law itself, and the dynamics of lawyer-client relationships, is one psychologists have not taken up. It is left to reflective lawyers and law professors to find psychological models and apply them to our professional lives. I attempt to do this, on the question of "estate planning" clients and their attitudes toward death, in this article.

There has been a substantial amount of recent psychological scholarship on attitudes toward death; it is a new area in that science, but an area which has taken on remarkable impetus in the last decade. None of this research has examined the psychology of will preparation, which I call the psychology of testation, but some of the data is closely enough related to testation to justify a bold layman's attempt to relate it to the law office. This article discusses one relevant example of the new data—a research project on "values destroyed by death"—and offers some conjecture, some modest field testing, and some comparisons with other psychological studies and with the life of lawyers. The latter part of the article suggests a few devices for legal-psychological research in the psychology of testation and some parallels between therapeutic counseling and testamentary counseling.

Comments

Originally published in Iowa Law Review.

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