The Lawyer Meets the Therapist, the Minister, and the Psychiatrist: Law School Cross-professional Collaborations - Timothy W. Floyd

• Citation: Vol. 63 No. 3
• Publication year: 2012

The Lawyer Meets the Therapist, the Minister, and the Psychiatrist: Law School Cross-Professional Collaborations

by Timothy W. Floyd*

I. Introduction

Lawyers in practice rarely encounter purely legal problems. Understanding the social, economic, political, and historical context is often crucial to resolving legal issues, and legal decisions are often dependent upon business, scientific, medical, psychological, and technological information. Most legal representation occurs within some field of enterprise or industry, and nearly all representation of clients involves complex emotional and interpersonal dynamics.

Early in my legal career, I realized the importance of knowing other fields and specialties in order to be an effective lawyer. My first practice experience was in commercial litigation, and our firm represented clients from a wide range of businesses. To represent the clients effectively, I needed to learn a great deal about the business or industry involved. I spent much of my time in discovery: reading volumes of client-generated documents, deposing the managers and technical specialists in the adversary company, and consulting with and deposing experts in a range of technical fields. These tasks dealt much more with facts than with law, and those facts were often in a specialized field of knowledge or industry. For one case, I learned a tremendous amount about truck tire retreads and the physics of rubber and heat. For another, I became

* Professor of Law; Director, Law and Public Service Program, Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law. Emory University (B.A., M.A., 1977); University of Georgia School of Law (J.D., 1980). Member, State Bar of Georgia.

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knowledgeable about the manufacture and repair of surgical instruments, and for one particularly compelling case, I learned more than I ever could have imagined about the chemistry involved in the storage of chicken manure (yes, really).

From commercial litigation, I moved into criminal practice as a public defender. Before long, I was immersing myself in the complexities of ballistics, fingerprints, forensic pathology, and especially mental and emotional disorders. Since becoming a full-time law professor twenty-three years ago, I have represented several criminal defendants who faced a possible death penalty. At the sentencing phase, the ability to argue effectively the existence of mitigating circumstances almost invariably requires a thorough understanding of the defendant's psycho-social history, and such an understanding depends on knowing enough psychology and sociology to be able to consult meaningfully with social workers and mental health experts. Not surprisingly, as law practice has become more interdisciplinary, lawyers increasingly work in teams comprised of people from different specialties and professions.

Law schools and legal educators have increasingly recognized the importance of interdisciplinary teaching and research to the effective practice of law. Law faculties now regularly include a few professors with Ph.D.'s, and more and more legal scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing upon academic disciplines such as economics, sociology, or philosophy.¹ Moreover, law schools now typically offer an array of interdisciplinary courses, such as Law and Economics, Law and Literature, and Legal History. Despite the increasing importance of interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship, law school interdisciplinary courses rarely include teachers and students from other professional

1. In my own law teaching, I have been drawn to interdisciplinary courses. I have taught courses in law and literature, and my seminars in ethics require significant reading of moral philosophy and theology. In addition, much of my scholarship has focused on the application of theology to legal issues, especially professional responsibility. See, e.g., Timothy W. Floyd, Realism, Responsibility, and the Good Lawyer: Niebuhrian Perspectives on Legal Ethics, 67 Notre Dame L. Rev. 587 (1992); Timothy W. Floyd, The Practice of Law as a Vocation or Calling, 66 Fordham L. Rev. 1405 (1998); Timothy W. Floyd, Lawyers and Prophetic Justice, 58 Mercer L. Rev. 513 (2007); Timothy W. Floyd, "What's Going On?" Christian Ethics and the Modern American Death Penalty, 32 Tex. Tech L.

Rev. 931 (2001).

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schools.² The great majority of courses are taught to law students by full-time law teachers.³

In this Essay, I will discuss three cross-professional courses that I have taught over the past decade that include faculty, and in two of the courses, students from other professional schools.⁴ The first was a Family Law Counseling clinical course at Texas Tech University, which I taught in collaboration with a faculty member from the University's Marriage and Family Therapy program. The other two courses are ones I have taught since coming to Mercer: Law, Theology, and Public Policy, taught with Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of Mercer's Center for Theology and Public Life; and Criminal Law and Psychiatry, taught with Dr. Richard Elliott, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Medical Ethics at the Mercer University School of Medicine. The only one of the three in which law students did not work with students from another professional school is Criminal Law and Psychiatry.

I believe all three courses provided the law (as well as nonlaw) students with unusually rewarding experiences. In writing this Essay, I hope to encourage others to experiment with interdisciplinarity, not only in a course's subject matter, but also in the composition of the...