Introduction: The Revival of Francophone Research on Justice and Mental Health

In France, the relations between the justice system and psychiatry first attracted attention among scholars of the social sciences in the 1970s. At that time, these relations were studied mainly from one particular angle: that of the encounter between judges and psychiatric experts, often in a criminal court, as so often depicted in the media, in books and on film. With Bernard Tavernier’s film The Judge and the Assassin as a cinematographic reference, the French media displayed a frequent an...