Terapinė jurisprudencija ir šiuolaikinės teisės humanizacijos problema

Abstract

The Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ) is an interdisciplinary field of science focusing on traumatic effects of the modern justice upon the mental health of people participating in it. TJ aims are to reform the traditionally cold, formalistic, indifferent to human feelings and merciless justice into a new, humanistic, warm, attentive to human feelings one. During the last two decades TJ attracted great interest and has contributed to legal reforms in many countries. There is no doubt that TJ is about to come to this country. The aims of this paper are: – to present the TJ to Lithuanian law community, to describe this phenomenon, and its contribution to development of the modern law; – to discuss TJ problems and its critics in the current scientific publications; – to delineate directions and boundaries of it application. The paper reviews the current critics of TJ. All critical reproaches can be divided in two groups. The first one includes TJ problems that are rather natural on the current initial stage of its development. They are critics concerning problems with specifying the concept of TJ, delineating its boundaries, and its separation from akin concept developed by other disciplines. The second one includes TJ problems that arise from differences of aims of TJ and law. The usual situation is a conflicting relation between TJ effort to protect a human and the tendency of law to execute a psychic pressure on him. The conflict between both arises each time when a law executing officer tries to consider also TJ demands. The paper proposes the general way of solution of this problem. It is done by specifying different situation in which difficulties are met in agreeing requirements of TJ and demands of the law. The paper presents a new “two direction conception” which aims to classify problems that arise from reconciling the aims of law with the demands of TJ. In a situation when demands of law and TJ coincide the main aim is the most consistent implementation of both. In the situation in when both conflict, the aim is the full assessment of both and the accurate weighting of their comparative importance.