Since the end of the eighteenth-century, law and psychiatry have struggled to provide stable definitions of responsibility, freedom, selfhood, and capacity. Blumenthal’s Law and the Modern Mind examines these struggles as they shaped decisions in civil courts in nineteenth-century America. Following the problem of responsibility across a wide range of issues (inheritance, contracts, marriage, accidents, and aging), Blumenthal demonstrates that judges, jurors, legal theorists, and law makers were unable to establish a consistent standard of judgment for deciding when individual decisions, commitments, or promises were legally binding once personal ability was at issue. Out of these issues, and the commentaries that they spawned, the civil courts produced an increasingly complex system of categories and distinctions that complicated the establishment of any single standard of rights or any single definition of freedom.
Of particular interest to readers of this journal is the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of Blumenthal’s undertaking. The core of...