Book Review: Law Without Enforcement: Integrating Mental Health and Justice
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900414 |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Ralph Sandland |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
maximizing his own personal profit from the fight. Meanwhile in cricket, many of
these issues are yet to arise. After many years of obsession with the divide between
the professional and the amateur players, cricket is finally coming face to face with
the problems of commerce and player power and movement that football has had to
confront in the past.
The final chapter draws together the strands from the rest of the book, drawing
analogies between the problems faced by each and likely to be faced by them all in
the future. The focus on standard form contracts and the inequality of bargaining
power between the performers and their employers is particularly pertinent. The link
between these two aspects of control, especially at the outset of a career in the enter-
tainment industry, is of primary importance. Most young performers would rather
sign whatever was put in front of them and forge a new career for themselves. The
employers know this and the contracts are structured to reflect this.
As the law continues to colonize all aspects of the entertainment industry, this book
gives the background and context in which this is taking place. The developments that
will undoubtedly occur in the near future can be more easily understood and fore-
seen following the analyses undertaken here.
MARK JAMES
Department of Law, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
NIGEL EASTMAN AND JILL PEAY(Eds), Law Without Enforcement: Integrating Mental
Health and Justice. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1999, 256 pp., £20.
This collection of essays on mental health law is, as the editors say in their afterword,
‘timed to be timely’. Mental health law is currently in a state of flux. The Department
of Health (DoH) has promised a ‘root and branch’ review of the Mental Health Act
1983, the operation of which has been criticized from any number of perspectives for
any number of reasons. A Scoping Review team reported its preliminary views to the
DoH in April 1999. The DoH has also announced major reform of the legal frame-
work of community care, while the recommendations to reform the law of incapac-
ity made by the Law Commission in 1995, shelved by the Conservative government,
have been largely accepted by the Labour administration. The volume under review
is in fact a part of that process, having developed out of the presentations made to a
couple of round table conferences, initiated at the behest of the DoH.
The essays in this collection are united by a concern for two basic questions: ‘does
current mental health law work?’ and ‘what would an improved legal regime amount
to?’ Some themes run through the book. For instance, and probably most import-
antly, there is widespread agreement that law can only play a marginal role in attend-
ing to the inadequacies of the current system in terms of the attitudes of those who
operate it, its under-resourcing, and its acceptance by the public. Training, education
and funding are more important than legal reform since without a change of attitudes
to the mentally disordered and adequate funding of care, legal reform will not amount
to much. Pivotal here is the contribution by Peter Barham and Marian Barnes, which
argues that mental health law reform must be posited, as it has not been before, on an
inclusive concept of citizenship. The book is topped and tailed with contributions
from the editors, which also serve to underscore these themes and provide the col-
lection with a sense of cohesion.
Nevertheless, Law without Enforcement is essentially a book of two halves, in two
senses. First, there is a (very useful) divide between those contributions that may be
labelled ‘internalist’ (focusing on specific elements of the current regime) and more
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