The raison d'être of the Law and Society movement has been the shared appreciation of interdisciplinarity – the recognition that one has much to learn from scholars of other disciplinary backgrounds who unite around a common interest in “law.” Though numerically a smaller presence in the field of sociolegal studies, for over a century psychologists have contributed much to our understanding of legal phenomena, from police discretion to jury decision making, from memory to insanity. More broadly, the turn toward behavioralism in the 1950s inspired others, such as political scientists, to employ psychological models and methods in the study of those – from judges to citizens – touched by law.

In this interview, Tom Tyler points to the cross-disciplinary conversation that ties his undergraduate experience in the 1960s to a decades-long research agenda into the legitimacy of law. What methodological challenges lie at the core of the psychologist's approach to studying law? To some, psychology's distinctive place in the social scientific study of law lies in its common use of experimental methods. However, Tom Tyler's choice of large-scale surveying for Why People Obey the Law puts him squarely “in the field” alongside all who seek to understand people in their relation to law, whether or not they do so quantitatively (see also Genn, Chapter 20). It is apparent, rather, that Tyler's need to theorize and operationalize Law and Society questions before collecting most of the data places a particular premium on planning and attention to detail. The fieldwork cannot generalize the theory but must follow it.