Reflections about Judicial Psychology and its Panorama in Brazil

Abstract

Legal Psychology is a specialty area arising from psychology as a science, in which traditional areas of education and action such Educational, Organizational and Clinic Psychology are compared. The very feature of this specialty is its interface with Law, the legal world, which produces epistemological and conceptual encounters and disagreements that intertwine the work of a legal psychologist. The sectors of Legal Psychology are many, since the most traditional ones such as those taking place in the Courts of Law and Prison up to innovating actions such as Mediation, Psychic Autopsy (retrospective evaluation by means of third-party information). This paper focuses on the Brazilian Legal Psychology, with the purpose of presenting and discussing the definition of Legal Psychology, its relationship with the Law, by highlighting its sectors of action according to the works presented in the 3^rd Iberian American Congress of Legal Psychology held in 1999 in Brazil and it also intends to address the challenges faced today by the Brazilian Legal Psychology.