Law and Behavioral Science

Abstract

Behavioral science, which has only recently become a subject of discussion in legal journals, has had its greatest impact on the newer social sciences, especially sociology.This success may be attributed either to the ability of the behavioral approach to answer the questions posed in sociology or to the willingness of sociologists to restrict their questions to those that can be answered by behavioral research; in either case, it is a fact that sociology today has almost no existence except as a behavioral science, It is wholly committed to the research methods and to the basic premise of behavioral science.'.This new approach has had a relatively lesser impact on political science, the discipline closest to law.Despite its success in sociology and social psychology, and despite the commitment to it on the part of many well known political scientists, it has not yet succeeded in capturing the profession, or, at least, in subduing all opposition within the profession.This might be attributed to the fact that political science, like law, is old, the carrier of traditions that date back to classical antiquity, and that traditional disciplines tend to resist innovation, sometimes merely because of an attachment to what is old and therefore familiar.Those who have publicly opposed the new behavioral political science have not, of course, knowingly chosen this non-rational ground on which to place their opposition; they have given reasons, but perhaps not in every case good reasons.They in turn have been ridiculed, but perhaps not in every case justifiably.At least one of them, Bernard Crick, the