Redding, whose fruitful academic career is rooted in the confluences of law and psychology, underscores the important harmony of the two fields. Because law is a system for codifying human behavior, he explains, psychologists trained in law and lawyers who have an understanding of psychology are uniquely situated to analyze laws, test the psychological assumptions implicit in them, and find ways to make them more consistent with our evolving grasp of human behavior.

The program graduates lawyers who are better equipped to council clients and to handle litigation issues like jury selection and eyewitness testimony. Those lawyers are also trained to be more effective in cross-examining expert witnesses and analyzing the various mental health issues that are often central to criminal, tort, and family law. Graduates of the program who become clinicians have a rare and valuable grasp of forensic psychology, a more comprehensive command of case analysis and statutory interpretation, and are ideally suited to provide effective expert analysis in the courtroom.

In Redding's view, however, the program's most valuable contribution is to the area of public policy. Through their work in legislatures, administrative tribunals, and the courts, lawyer-psychologists have a unique set of tools that allows them to develop more empirically and theoretically sophisticated public policy.

For Redding himself, it was this particular interest in public policy that propelled his own journey through law and psychology. And in an implicit way, these divergent interests merged against the backdrop of Hampden-Sydney, where Professors DeWolfe and Herdegen fostered his love of social science and where a rich political climate infused his daily routine. He wavered between law school and graduate school after college, ultimately enrolling in the Master of Science program at Vanderbilt, where his interest in legal psychology first came into focus.

That new clarity led him next to law school at Washington & Lee, where he was a Frances Lewis Law Fellow. After clerking at the D.C. Court of Appeals in Washington and practicing civil litigation and family law in Virginia for a few years, he decided academic research was the best way to meld his interests.

Richard Redding '84 in the halls of Villanova University School of Law, where he directs the innovative Law & Psychology program.

Because of his emphasis on public policy, Redding wanted most to be a law professor. But he also wanted to keep a foot planted firmly in the social sciences, and did so by continuing his psychological training at the University of Virginia, earning his Ph.D. The University then asked him to stay on as an assistant professor and as associate director of the nationally recognized Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy at the Law and Medical Schools.

In 2001 the preeminent journal American Psychologist published an article by Redding voicing his concern for what he sees as a bias against conservative political views in social science research. An intriguing manifesto against the "problematic consequences of liberal hegemony" in various areas of policy research, the piece made waves within the typically liberal psychology field and garnered attention across the disciplines. Less than a year later, Villanova invited him to direct their Law and Psychology Program.

Redding continues to pursue the issue of political bias in research as well as various other issues relating to political psychology. One of his recent projects explores the idea that psychological factors inform political views. He is particularly interested in finding out if conservatives, as stereotypes and some recent research within the field suggest, really do tend to be more cynical. He is now exploring possible links between conservative views and psychological levels of "depressive realism" and self-efficacy.

Another facet of his scholarship is juvenile justice and delinquency. Periodically an expert witness for Philadelphia cases involving a child who has killed someone, Redding has just completed two books as well as a book chapter on the topic. His most recent project, the focus of the book chapter, involved interviewing serious juvenile offenders to see if they knew, prior to committing their crime, that they could be tried as adults. Pursuing this and other related lines of inquiry, he hopes to gauge how expectations of the justice system influence a juvenile's actions.

Within the more general context of criminal law and psychology, Redding has taken particular note of the growing canon of research over the last ten years that suggests a biological basis for certain types of criminality. Interested in how this increasingly prevalent research will function within the legal system's conception of free will and culpability, Redding is evaluating examples of how it is being used in court cases.

Having published more than 75 articles and co-authored three books, Redding says he divides his time equally between research, administra-tive duties, and teaching, which he does primarily at the law school. His classes range from mandatory first-year courses with one or two hundred students to upper-level seminars with ten. His one consistency, he admits with a grin that is part sheepish, part wry, are the high standards he holds for students. But he also notes that he balances the rigors of his pedagogy by engaging students through an interactive approach to law, regularly involving them in real cases and incorporating direct observation at area mental health facilities.

Redding also has directed major research and development projects for government agencies and served on juvenile justice task forces for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is a consultant to the US Justice Department, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Despite an apparently demanding schedule, he also manages time to indulge his passion for playing polo, his rather involved affair with political discourse, and his penchant for collecting antiques.

Redding's sundry hobbies are perhaps indicative of the cross-disciplinary sensibilities that first led him to explore law and psychology. That pursuit has yielded a powerful and important perspective and inspired a career dedicated to cultivating it. Neil Gilliss '99, Grant Hayes '00, Procter Fishburne '99, and Mark Simonton '96 in Brazil for their International Residency, a component of the MBA program at the Robins School of Business, University of Richmond.