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Book Review: Rediscovery of Justice
Frank, Jerome
Frank, Jerome
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38CalLRev351.pdf
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Abstract
It is easy to guess why the editors of the California Law Review asked me to review this book. For the author has used materials which, for a different and much more restricted purpose, I used some twenty years ago in my book, Law and The Modern Mind. There I drew on some aspects of the writings of the child psychologist, Piaget, and of the Freudians, to support a partial explanation-–I listed fourteen others–of the unrealistic demand, by adults, for unattainable legal certainty. In brief, my partial explanation was that this demand in part derives from the carry-over into adult years of emotional attitudes of young children, engendered in the family. This demand, I suggested, when made by adults, signifies emotional immaturity partly caused by unduly prolonged emotional father-dependence. A mature society I envisioned as one in which such father-dependence would vanish after childhood. "Modern civilization," I wrote, "demands a mind free of father-governance. To remain father-governed in adult years is peculiarly the modem sin." We should end the "search for the father-judge," so that "the child indeed becomes father to the man, i.e., each individual becomes his own father and thus eliminates the need for fatherly authority." Holmes I described as the "completely adult jurist" who had "put away childish longings for a father-controlled world. . . . We might say that, being rid of the need of a strict father, he can afford not to use his authority as if he, himself, were a strict father." I should add that in that book I repeatedly warned that I considered psychology not a science but an art, still in its early youth, an art which utilized concepts most of which were "as ifs," with too little recognition by psychologists of that fact.