ABSTRACT
Law and the Modern Mind, along with Courts on Trial (1949a), are the works for which Jerome Frank is best known. In Law and the Modern Mind, Frank properly ridicules writers who prefer to talk about "law" distracted from actual court decisions. Frank does not wrestle sufficiently with potential alternatives to a decision-based, judge-centered, and predictive theory of law. One problem with a theory of law that focuses on actual official actions, especially actual judicial decisions, is that it does not have the resources to explain the idea of "legal mistake". Frank, like many legal realists, attacks the conceptualism or philosophical realism he finds in some commentators and judges. While Frank regularly repeats that this psychoanalytic theory is offered only as a "partial explanation", and Frank himself summarizes a long list of potential alternative explanations, it is the psychoanalytic explanation to which the text regularly returns.
