Conference on Psychology and Lawyering: Coalescing the Field

February 21-22, 2014
UNLV Boyd School of Law, Las Vegas, NV

The field of psychology has a tremendous amount to offer practicing attorneys. In this two day conference leading academics and practitioners from both law and psychology will discuss how insights drawn from multiple fields of  psychology, as well as from neuroscience, can improve specific lawyering practices.  Panels will focus on client relations and perceptions of fairness, applications of psychology to lawyer decision making, legal persuasion, the courtroom, legal ethics, and lawyer wellbeing.  A special luncheon session will highlight how law professors can teach relational competencies and emotional intelligence.  Tom Tyler, the Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School, will give the keynote address entitled “Legitimacy and the Exercise of Legal Authority.”

The conference is an effort to coalesce academics and practitioners from a variety of fields who together are increasingly recognizing the broad relevance of psychology to lawyering.  Traditionally, those who connected law and psychology focused primarily on juries, trials, and criminals' states of mind. But today, researchers from various sub-disciplines of both law and psychology are broadening their focus to examine the additional ways in which psychology can be of use to a wide variety of common lawyering practices in both civil and criminal settings.  In an effort to help researchers and practitioners continue to collaborate across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines the conference will include a working lunch on whether and how to continue to grow this new field.

Registration
While there is no conference registration fee, attendance will be limited. Registration is now closed due to high registration.

Publication & Recording of Conference
Select papers from the conference will be published in the Nevada Law Journal in 2014-2015.  The conference will be recorded and made available on the website for the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution. 

Sponsors
This conference is co-sponsored by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Boyd School of Law; its Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution; the University of Illinois Program on Law, Behavior and Social Science; the UC Davis School of Law; LexisNexis; and Thomson Reuters.

More Information
If you have questions, please contact:

Sandra Rodriguez
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Boyd School of Law
Sandra.Rodriguez@unlv.edu
(702) 895-2428