Beverley Clough, The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries, Routledge, 2021, hb, 208 pp, £130.00
| Published date | 01 January 2024 |
| Author | Magdalena Furgalska |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12838 |
Reviews
courts, the limits of administrative discretion and its interpretive, operational,
and enforcement elements. The book’s broad scope and true interdisciplinary
references certainly made my reading list much longer.
Or Brook∗
Beverley Clough,The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond
Binaries, Routledge, 2021, hb, 208 pp, £130.00
Mental capacity law has become one of the key interest areas in socio-legal
scholarship. Over the past decade, we have witnessed an inux of inuential
research which examines, explores and challenges the doctrine, the premise and
the workings of mental capacity laws. The English Mental Capacity Act 2005
has been subject to signicant scrutiny nationally and internationally, given its
inuence on capacity laws in other jurisdictions, with scholars and governments
keen to learn about the framework’s wins and losses.The impetus for an interest
in examining the very notion of mental capacity can be directly associated
with the inuence and importance of the UN Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the rst human r ights treaty to promote
so explicitly ‘the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental
freedoms by all persons with disabilities’ (UNCRPD, Art 1).
Whereas mental capacity law is most often associated with medical, wel-
fare or nancial decision-making, it has a far greater and much more intimate
reach. For instance, the law is used for everyday decision-making, where a per-
son with a disability is supported to make decisions about seemingly mun-
dane – yet important in forming one’s identity – aspects of everyday life.
These include food choices, leisure activities or clothing. Similarly, the Act
may be used to ascertain one’s life choices like where to live, what educa-
tion to undertake or what employment-related decisions ought to be made
(see for instance the work of Rosie Harding and Ezgi Tasciouglu, Everyday
Decisions Project Report: Supporting Legal Capacity through Care, Support and Em-
powerment (Birmingham Law School, 2017) at https://legalcapacity.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/Everyday_Decisions_Project_Report.pdf (last vis-
ited 31 August 2023)). Mental capacity law, in many ways, has therefore a close
and even intimate bearing on people’s everyday lives and realities, particularly
given the law’s reliance on relational processes involved in the statute’s imple-
mentation in practice.
Some of the most inuential work in this terrain comes from the socio-legal
scholarship adopting feminist and disability approaches. Ongoing debates sur-
rounding these laws reect progress in society at large and a growing concern
for the rights of those perceived as vulnerable,a shift from paternalism to greater
autonomy. In this context, Beverley Clough’s monog raph, The Spaces of Mental
Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries is a welcome, innovative,and challeng ing
∗Associate Professor of Competition Law and Policy,University of Leeds.
© 2023 The Author.The Modern Law Review © 2023 The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2024) 87(1) MLR 235–240 235
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