Forensic psychiatry is a sub-specialty of psychiatry. It is the interface between law and psychiatry. A forensic psychiatrist may determine the competency to stand trial. He also helps the court to facilitate the adjudicative process. Studies in Forensic Psychiatry is Monograph Supplements to the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Topics covered include psychogenesis in the psychoses of prisoners, the nature and treatment of the psychoses of prisoners, the forensic phase of litigious paranoia, the malingerer: a clinical study, and the analysis of a case of kleptomania.

When, in 1810, Franz Joseph Gall said: "The measure of culpability and the measure of punishment can not be determined by a study of the illegal act, but only by a study of the individual committing it," he expressed an idea which has, in late years, come to be regarded as a trite truism. This called forth as an unavoidable consequence a more lively interest on the part of various social agencies in the personality of the criminal, with the resultant gradually increasing conviction that the suppression of crime is not primarily a legal question, but is rather a problem for the physician,...