The meaning and significance of psychological law theories in the history of legal thought

The paper examines the nature, meaning and significance of psychological law theories in the context of the history of legal thoughts with regard to the past two centuries. The subject of the study is the peculiarities of the emergence, evolution and interpretation of the position of psychological theories and concepts of law in the work of domestic and foreign lawyers. The paper compares the evolution of the psychology of law as an interdisciplinary complex field of knowledge at the intersection of law and psychology, on the one hand, and, in fact, psychologically oriented theories of legal cognition and legal understanding, on the other hand. The relevance of the problem under study is given by the need to fill the gap in the coverage of the history of legal thought in terms of psychologically oriented attitudes and methods of law cognition. The scientific novelty of the study lies in defining the main direction of development of the history of psychological law theories, new and understudied sources related to the evolution of psychological approaches to law, as well as in revealing the specificity of psychologism as an essential element of the language of legal concepts.