Research on mental health pays increasing attention to the influence of social institutions on subjective well-being over the life course. Yet little research has considered how belief in the promise of legal institutions may have beneficial effects for well-being. Through structural equation models of longitudinal data, our findings suggest that belief in the neutrality and fairness of legal institutions has salutary effects for mental health net of social and economic status and across individuals from a wide range of ethnic groups. By combining research in the sociology of mental health, cultural sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of law, we extend the emerging literature on the institutional determinants of mental health by including attention to law as one of the central organizing institutions of social life.

心理健康研究越来越关注社会制度对生命过程中主观幸福感的影响。然而，很少有研究考虑过相信法律制度的承诺如何可能对福祉产生有益影响。通过纵向数据的结构方程模型，我们的研究结果表明，对法律制度的中立性和公平性的信念对社会和经济地位以及来自广泛种族群体的个人的心理健康具有有益的影响。通过结合心理健康社会学、文化社会学、社会心理学和法律社会学的研究，我们扩展了关于心理健康的制度决定因素的新兴文献，将法律作为社会生活的中心组织机构之一。