Consent and compliance

Serviceable subjects in involuntary psychiatric commitment hearings in Paris and New York

Bibliographic Data

ID5649458
AuthorsAlex V Barnard (0000-0001-8470-9196, New York University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages1-36
Publication date2025-10-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLaw & Society Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0023-9216 • E-ISSN: 1540-5893
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/lsr.2025.10066
OpenAlexW4415349837
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited85

How do legal and medical professionals construct patients' legal status and mental states in courtrooms, and how do patients themselves shape those constructions? This paper analyzes 300 hearings in Paris and New York City where people who have been involuntarily hospitalized in psychiatric facilities ask to be released. In both cities, courts reject the vast majority of requests. They do so by drawing on the two systems' distinctive legal repertoires and control capacity to make patients into different kinds of serviceable subjects: people whose rights are given nominal consideration in the courtroom, but who are nonetheless classified as needing the forced interventions that the psychiatric system has the resources to provide. In Paris, legal professionals emphasize procedural rights while deferring to medical evaluations of patients' consent, defined as their underlying willingness to accept long-term treatment. In New York, lawyers challenge psychiatric expertise but bargain with doctors and patients over compliance, understood as a short-term acceptance of medication. This paper reorients attention from the self-governing subjects that hybrid medical-legal-welfare interventions claim to ultimately produce toward the more contingent and situational serviceable subjects that allow for ongoing professional collaboration and institutional processing in contexts of diminished resources and expanded patients' rights

Ethics in medical practice · Healthcare Decision-Making and Restraints · Medical Malpractice and Liability Issues

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