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43 Tex. L. Rev. 1094 (1964-1965)
On the Interdependence of Law and the Behavioral Sciences

handle is hein.journals/tlr43 and id is 1134 raw text is: ON THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF LAW AND THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES ARTHUR SELWYN MILLER* 1. For many years, decades even, recognition has been growing in the legal profession that law is not an autonomous discipline or study, but must be seen in and as a reflection of the social context in which it exists. Law itself is not the private plaything (or workthing) of lawyers but has a large, albeit only dimly recognized, social role. The legal element in any social transaction or dispute unavoidably has policy overtones; these may be articulated, as is often the case in constitutional law decisions, or they may be unexpressed, as in many private law decisions-but present they are, nonetheless. Legal norms are the official pronouncements of public or social policies, whether those norms are stated by legislatures, by courts, or by administrators and whether they immediately affect only a very few people (such as the litigants before a court) or whether they are to have a broad application (as do statutes). Law thus is more than the black-letter rule so adored by hornbook writers and the American Law Institute. As is so often true, Holmes saw this as long ago as the turn of the century. His observation that the law-man of the future was not the black-letter specialist but the expert in economics and statistics1 has provided the text for much later gloss and exegesis which evidence a slowly gathering force which is integrating law and the social or behavioral sciences. Much was said in the 1920s and '30s, for example, about the need for such a meshing. To a marked extent, the exponents of the movement known as legal realism tried to do just that. The legal realists were not very successful, but they did plant seeds which are now beginning to bear fruit; and Berle and Means' book on the corporation set a high mark thirty years ago toward which later commentators could aspire. Without question, the past three decades have been marked by little-heralded activities, by lawyers and behavioral scientists working separately, to bring the two more closely together-and thus to bring a higher degree of understanding and of rationality into law and the legal process. One need only compare modem casebooks (which are really coursebooks) now used in law schools with those of the 1920s and '30s or to examine curriculum offerings in leading law schools to discern a major breakaway from the Langdellian * Professor of Law, The George Washington University Law School and Graduate School of Public Law. 1 Holmes, The Path of the Law, 10 HIfv. L. REv. 457 (1897). 2 BERT & MEANS, THE Monmwa CORPORATION AND PRIVATE PROPERTY (1932). 1094

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