Clough Beverley A
School of Law, Centre for Law & Social Justice, University of Leeds, UK.
Med Law Rev. 2018 May 1;26(2):246-275. doi: 10.1093/medlaw/fwy012.
This article explores the development of law and policy relating to mental capacity law, situating this within the context of the binaries that have driven this development. Whilst the story of this historical development is well worn, considering it through this lens allows some of the previously hidden problematic consequences of these binaries to come to the fore in our debates. The article will expose these issues through considering the binary between capacity and incapacity, and the interlinked binaries of empowerment/protection and autonomy/paternalism underpinning policies and debate in this area. It will be shown that the struggles around the boundaries of this framework are becoming more pressing given the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which presents a more fluid and potentially transformative framework for thinking about the legal subject in this context. There is here a danger, however, that we may end up falling too easily into seeing these issues through our current framework and in turn missing the opportunity to realise the potential of the UNCRPD. The article will disrupt and denaturalise the 'given-ness' of these conceptual boundaries, drawing on theoretical insights that seek to foreground relationality and the dynamic nature and processes of law. This opens the space in which to reimagine alternative trajectories for legal and ethical responses to take, and to provoke new conceptual pathways.
本文探讨了与精神能力法相关的法律和政策的发展，并将其置于推动这一发展的二元对立背景之中。虽然这一历史发展的故事已为人熟知，但通过这一视角来审视它，能让这些二元对立中一些先前被隐藏的问题后果在我们的辩论中凸显出来。本文将通过考量能力与无能力之间的二元对立，以及支撑该领域政策和辩论的赋权/保护与自主/家长主义这两组相互关联的二元对立，来揭示这些问题。鉴于《联合国残疾人权利公约》（UNCRPD）提出了一个在这种背景下思考法律主体的更灵活且可能具有变革性的框架，围绕这一框架边界的斗争正变得愈发紧迫。然而，这里存在一种风险，即我们可能最终过于轻易地通过当前框架来看待这些问题，进而错失实现《联合国残疾人权利公约》潜力的机会。本文将借助旨在突出关联性以及法律的动态本质和过程的理论见解，打破并使这些概念边界的“既定性”非自然化。这开辟了一个空间，可用于重新构想法律和伦理应对的替代轨迹，并激发新的概念路径。
