rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Law and the modern mind
    sub title: consciousness and responsibility in American legal culture
  name:
    name part: Blumenthal, Susanna L.
    name part: 1967-
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: mau
    date issued: 2016
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: 385 pages ; 25 cm.
  abstract: In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders' vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence. Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons.
  table of contents: Common sense and common law -- The medical jurisprudence of insanity -- Unnatural dispositions -- The eccentricity of the will -- Speculative mania in the age of contract -- The consideration of love -- The responsible originator.
  note: Susanna L. Blumenthal.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    topic: Insanity (Law)
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Mental health laws
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Liability (Law)
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Common law
    geographic: United States
  subject:
    topic: Common sense
  classification: KF9242 .B58 2016
  classification: 346.7301/38
  identifier: 9780674048935
  identifier: 0674048938
  identifier: 2015012785
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 150331
    record change date: 20170926120216.0
    record identifier: in00003870333