Law is a normative value to help society live in collectivity and harmony. For law to be a supreme regulator of all, it must become integral in theory and practice. An integral dimension of law helps State, society and legal systems to balance and harmonize competing claims arising out of complexity and heterogeneity of life and changing needs.
Professor Dr. K. Parameswaran outlines his integral theory of law in this series of articles by showing how law must integrate knowledge from other disciplines; bring them under what law wants from them. “…Thus, when law becomes integral, it opens practical and yet unfailing solutions to assist peace, progress, prosperity and protection of all, for our current times and future age…” – author claims. Part II, concludes the ‘integral dimension of law’ that exists between Law and Psychology.
We saw in Part I how interdisciplinary legal research led to two camps of thought. One, law and psychology and other, legal psychology. Former deals with interrelationship between legal and psychological understanding on issues which law and order deals with human behavior in society; whereas, latter deals with application of psychological tools on legal organs, instruments and actors that legal systems of State, its Constitution and its laws encounter in courts and settlement mechanisms. We also saw difficulties of two camps of thought to be mutually complimentary and come together to accept the other in their respective domains. And, this difficulty is because current epistemological methods on origin, source and development of legal and psychological knowledge are not yet adequately inter-disciplined. With challenges that globalizing world and legal systems across jurisdictions face where violations and non-compliances grow resulting in disorder, future legal research cannot avoid integral dimension of law that exists between law and psychology. It consists of three major elements as shown below.
Law is seen as one that consists of three things. One, governing rules of behavior and their code of conduct in society, two, State-authorized set of legal systems to operate rules and, three, law of the Constitution and its three Organs (executive-legislative-judiciary) that gives foundational support to the other two. In its depths, integral approach considers law as psychology itself in one way as it deals essentially with human behavior and its relations with fellow human beings and things arising out of human interventions. Legal knowledge at present understands human behavior only when it is expressed whether consciously or unconsciously to leave positive or negative impacts on people and things in society. However, legal discipline as a whole cannot wait to work only with consequences or only when an outcome results externally impacting and leading society to problems of law and order. For example, sexual offences cannot be seen from external legal punishmentpoint of view of offenders leaving victims to suffer social humiliation and physical pain as quality and quantity of punishments to offenders cannot bring justice or heal victim’s physical wounds and social humiliations or is any solution to problems of continuing sexual offences, no matter punishments have limited deterrence effects with mixed results on potential offenders. If State and its legal systems want to control crime-incidents or create crime-free society, can legal knowledge that legal systems implement avoid integrating legal knowledge with psychological knowledge in understanding crime, criminal, crime-time and crime space in society? Law ought to integrate individual and social human behavior and, State and its Organs and legal systems must become conscious to integralise by foreseeing and diagnosing crimes from within-inside; its inner ambit of ‘animus’ leading to outer circumstance of ‘actus’. Integral dimensions emphasize this more than mere complimentary relations of interdisciplinary approach that are studied as law and psychology or legal psychology. State and its three Organs and their legal actors who frame, execute and interpret policies ought to possess psychological knowledge and must consider law as a subject of psychology to bring true justice to society if ‘prevention is better than cure’ is to be practiced
Law as psychology must start from legal education. Legal academics should include psychology both as separate and interrelated subject of studies; either core or optional or seminar subjects under graduation or higher studies. Or psychological dimensions on legal compliance and violations should be studied be they civil or criminal laws under psychological spectrums of knowledge in addition to legal spectrums. With information explosion, integration of knowledge is relatively easy if teacher and taught collaborate on this interdisciplinary exercise with psychology teachers and practitioners to assist legal academics. When any legal research is undertaken, doctrinal and empirical psycho-legal components should be included. For example, to understand sexual offences at workplace, capabilities of mind-emotion body complex with organizational targets or gender-pattern in projects and teams should be case-studied for peaceful co-equalization. Or juvenile offences should be studied under cross-cultural understandings, school-environment, peer pressure, parent-teacher relations, development of extra-curricular faculties for arts, theatre, music, sports, nature observation, relationship-bonding to positive nurturing of energies towards self-development, collective harmony and social order. In short, researching on causes for violations of order and suggesting means of development is in the hands of psycholegal research.
Criminal legal and justice systems need thorough guidelines on punishments and sentences. Current one-size fit-all methods to treat all offenders as one category and same degree of human beings for quality and quantity of punishments have proved wrong as punishments failed to distinguish gradation of capacities of mind-emotion body complex that varies and is psychologically unique to every person. As a result, neither punishments help in any reduction of crimes nor prevent another crime by same criminal unless sentences are lucky to favor good results for systems. Also, neither incarceration nor economic fines touch the censoring-sense of guilt that can prevent one from committing offences as commissions of offenses take place externally from offences committed to one’s own self whose inner guidance is violated. In this context, efficacy of punishments remains highly questionable except dreaded crimes that cannot avoid serious punishments including death penalty. It is a universal understanding that human nature that commits offences are result of stress arising out of disharmony from social, cultural and space-settings that lead to division in one’s own self conflicting the mind-emotion-body complex. This stress becomes a vicious cycle and tug of war between internal understanding and external conduct. Conversely, when freedom is achieved from social, mental and emotional stresses, conflict in mind-emotion-body complex gets resolved and human nature tends to be voluntarily orderly to one’s self and all-inclusive to other’s self which in psychological terms are peace and compassion of life individually and collectively. Thus, practice of sentence pronouncements on criminals that are largely non-productive can be phased out slowly in course of time by State and its legal systems by promoting positive sociocultural-political-economic developments by which external stress and inner conscience are not congested. Even if punishments are to be given, it must psychologically rehabilitate offenders. Spirituality and its values of peace meditation, joy-bonding of mutual respect and affection, energy-development of body-stability etc., which are foundational dimensions of psychology should be taught in schools and colleges and especially in legal schools and national law universities. State, its three Organs and legal systems should think of these psychological methods as part of justice-education, peace-security and well-being harmony. This makes law to draw lessons from life and psychology that explores inner dimensions of life to contribute legal systems.
Important concerns on psychology as a part of legal discipline is in understanding various kinds of psychology and their application of knowledge. Psychology as a standalone discipline is a field of unlimited enquiry into core truths and reality of life. However, law as psychology, law and psychology and legal psychology need a direction which this integral approach serves where focus of legal discipline is governance of human behavior towards ultimate justice of all kinds for everyone in a collective society without diluting principles and practices of Constitutional liberty, equality and fraternity. If psychological knowledge solves problems of unconscious self, patterns of behavior, conditioning by environment etc., and impact dynamic self-motivation to individual and collective self in society and, consequently State and its Organs make use of such psychological knowledge, law becomes therapeutic and State and legal systems a healer when required. And not a cantankerous system that is not yet able to significantly control recurrence of crimes and violations from happening except seeing the changing faces in the queues of offenders and distressed victims. Follow ‘Integral Dimension of Law: Law and History’ in the next series of issues.
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