Acknowledgements

First, I acknowledge and apologize for my tardiness. Evaluating Com­petencies went into its second printing several years ago, has been a "best seller" in the Perspectives in Law and Psychology Book Series, and has been out of print for the past four years.

The maturing of the field of forensic psychological assessment had much to do with my negligence. During the 1990s I found it far more exciting to participate in this field's fast-paced development than to rework existing ideas. New territory kept opening up, and the task of re­treading old ground could not compete with the lure of discovery. In addition, the rapid expansion of this field rendered the prospect of cata­loguing its recent developments quite intimidating. Fifteen years ago it was possible to be a generalist, knowing most of what was happening in the many assessment areas that Evaluating Competencies described in the first edition. As I approached the second edition, however, I realized that I was no longer an "expert" in all of those areas. I finally solved this problem by inviting chapter authors—Randy Borum, John Edens, Jennifer Moye, and Randy Otto—and I am greatly in debt to them for the strength of their contributions and their willingness to help me finish this job.

While the first edition had no dedication page, this one does. The name of Saleem Shah is not well known to many of our second-generation colleagues in Psychology and Law. He performed little research, pub­lished few papers, and was not a clinical or forensic practitioner. Yet many who were there in Psychology and Law's early years of the 1970s and 1980s would argue that Saleem was one of the chief architects of the field, doing more than almost anyone else—in his role as administrator of the NIMH Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency—to provide an opportunity for others to establish the foundations of mental health law research and forensic assessment. How he did this has been detailed in a series of articles (in Law and Human Behavior, 1993, Vol.

Thanks many times over to Bruce Sales for serving as editor of the first edition of this book, to Alan Goldstein who browbeat me into finish­ing the second edition, and to Ron Roesch, current editor of the Perspectives in Law and Psychology Book Series, for tolerating my tardiness. The effort will have been worthwhile if Evaluating Competencies plays a part in stimulating a new generation of researchers and clinicians to use psychology with integrity, in service to the justice system and persons whose incapacities require special legal protections.

Finally, thanks to Paul Appelbaum with whom I have "talked legal competencies" for so many years, and to my other colleagues and friends in the Law and Psychiatry Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, a wonderful group with whom I've spent most of the years subsequent to the first edition. They have made every day an intel­lectual adventure that has had a cumulative effect in maturing my thoughts about the topics in this book.