Back to Find Units Page

Unit of Study LAWS3010 - Psychiatry, Psychology and the Law (2025)

Show me unit information for year

Unit Snapshot

  • Enrolment information

    N/A

Unit description

Provides students with an overview of the way law and judicial systems affect the individual and how various theories reflect on the process of internalisation of law. Introduces students to psychological and psychoanalytic theories to enable them to assess why some people internalise social prohibitions and other do not. Students will be encouraged to think critically about how psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry can help legal practitioners and assess how new studies in the domain of neuroscience contribute to legal reasoning.

Unit content

  1. How do people internalise law?
  2. Difference between neurotic, psychotic and perverse subjective structure and their attitude towards social prohibitions
  3. Crime and subjective attitudes towards punishment
  4. Shame and guilt
  5. Psychopaths – lack of remorse and lack of compassion
  6. Psychiatry and the power of experts in the legal domain
  7. Problems with forensics fraud
  8. Neuroscience and law
  9. CSI effect
  10. Adolescents and crime
  11. Psychiatry, crime and genetics
  12. Psychological problems in legal profession

Availabilities

Not currently available in 2025

Learning outcomes

Unit Learning Outcomes express learning achievement in terms of what a student should know, understand and be able to do on completion of a unit. These outcomes are aligned with the graduate attributes. The unit learning outcomes and graduate attributes are also the basis of evaluating prior learning.

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

Analyse the connection between psychology and law;

Assess the role able to be played by psychiatry and psychology in the criminal justice system;

Critically reflect on fraudulent testimonies;

Critically analyse the extent, consistency and adequacy of the legal system's appreciation of psychological knowledge in the contexts of the criminal and civil law.