Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Legal Landscapes, and Form Reform: The Case of Diversion

Abstract

At the University of Puerto Rico School of Law (UPR) in the fall term of the 2008-2009 academic year, I offered, for the first time, a sentencing and corrections seminar—approached, of course, with a distinctly therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) spin. During that term, I was also asked to review a manuscript prepared by Florida Coastal School of Law student Dax Miller. Dax Miller’s paper, prepared for Professor Susan Daicoff’s Comprehensive Law course and published in The Florida Coastal Law Review, did not relate to sentencing and corrections. Rather, it critiqued, from a TJ perspective, the standard Florida divorce agreement form. Moreover, Dax Miller proposed a rewritten form, one highly consistent with TJ principles. At just the time that I read Dax Miller’s paper I came across, in my assigned sentencing casebook, the federal pretrial diversion form, and concluded that it too was in desperate need of Daxing. Suddenly, it occurred to me that Dax Miller had opened up a completely new potential branch of TJ scholarship—what might be called Form Reform.