The conceptual approach to legal competence assessments outlined in Chapter 2 requires the assessment of functional abilities and behaviors related to the legal competence in question.
Most assessment methods traditionally used in psychiatry and clinical psychology, however, were designed to assess psychopathological states, personality traits, and general intelligence.
These assessment methods will continue to play an important role in many legal competence assessments (see Causal component, Chapter 2). Yet the previous analysis has shown that the use of these methods alone will not satisfy courts' needs for relevant and credible information about examinees' functional abilities related to legal competencies.For this reason, a specialized set of assessment tools has evolved as a response to the special demands of assessments for legal competencies. The first part of this chapter defines this special class of instruments and provides a model that clarifies their objectives and value. The second section describes special issues in the evaluation of these instruments and establishes criteria for reviews that appear in later chapters. The third section briefly describes the criteria that were employed in selecting the instruments that are reviewed in Chapters 4-9, as well as the standardized outline for each of those review chapters.