A raceless legal psychology in a system marked by race

Abstract

Despite the fact that evidence of racial inequality in the U.S. criminal legal system has become overwhelming, the field of legal psychology has largely ignored issues of race and systemic racism. Although legal psychology focuses on a system that has disproportionately affected certain racial groups, and much of the field questions the fairness of the system, its research seems to rarely take a critical approach to account for racial and systemic factors that may shape an individual's psychological experience. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to analyze the lack of attention to race and racism in legal psychology, document the extent to which the field has historically attended to issues of race and systemic racism, and provide best practices for future research to embrace a critical race legal psychology. To document inattention to race and systemic racism, we query, code, and analyze all articles published in two of legal psychology's most influential journals (Law and Human Behavior and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law), finding, indeed, a dearth of articles on these topics.