From a Civil Libertarian to a Sanitarian
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2007.00406.x |
| Author | Lawrence O. Gostin |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 34, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2007
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 594±616
From a Civil Libertarian to a Sanitarian
Lawrence O. Gostin*
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a
major book that influenced the author. Previous contributors include
Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow,
Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, Andre
Â-Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, and
Michael Adler.
Mr. Gostin arrived at the Forensic Mental Health Unit dressed in dungarees
pinned together with visible safety pins, a dirty khaki shirt, and his overall
appearance was considerably below the standard set for our patients. During
the time Mr. Gostin was on the Unit our treatment programs were virtually at
a standstill, . . . [and he provoked] unusual, unnatural, and dissident behavior
by our patients. Mr. Gostin [was] doing harm to the usual tranquility of the
Unit and had succeeded in convincing many patients to question and even
denounce our treatment programs and ward routines . . . Mr. Gostin has been
and continues to be disruptive, time consuming, a nuisance, non-purposeful
and unwanted on this Unit.
Eugene V. Maynard, MD, Forensic Psychiatric Director,
Forensic Mental Health Unit, North Carolina, July 11, 1972
1
The first love of my life was Jean Catherine Allison from the village of
Applethwaite, near Keswick, Cumbria, where her father was the caretaker
for a cottage built by Coleridge for Wordsworth. From a professional
perspective, the first love of my life was mental health. And the two loves
are intertwined, as I met Jean while working as the Legal Director of MIND
(National Association for Mental Health) in 1974, and some of our most
594
ß2007 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2007 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Georgetown University Law Center, 600 New Jersey Ave. N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20001 and the Johns Hopkins University, 615 North
Wolfe Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, United States of America
gostin@law.georgetown.edu
1 Memorandum from Dr. Eugene V. Maynard and Mr. Jack Allen to Dr. Ladislaw
Peter, `Impressions of Mr. Larry Gostin' (11 July 1972) in W.B. Buford and L.O.
Gostin (eds.), Patients' Rights in North Carolina's Mental Health Institutions (1973)
135±6.
enthralling `dates' (from my vantage point) involved going to high security
mental institutions, such as Broadmoor, Rampton, and Moss Side.
During my eight years at MIND, I strived to change the Mental Health
Act from a medical model to a patients' rights model. Many of the proposals
in the two-volume MIND report, A Human Condition, were adopted in the
2
MIND brought cases in the domestic courts and
the European Court of Human Rights ranging from the right to vote and
pursue grievances in courts of law to the right of review by a tribunal and
humane conditions of confinement.
The second love of my professional life was civil liberties, as I became
the General Secretary of the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL),
now called `Liberty.' I led NCCL during its fiftieth anniversary in the
prophetic year of 1984.
3
Aneurin Bevin, E.M. Forster, A.A. Milne, George
Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells were among its founders. At
NCCL, I became embroiled in politically contentious debates during the
Thatcher era, with the national miners' dispute, the troubles in Ireland, and
NCCL's legal representation of a neo-Nazi group called the National Front.
I publicly resigned from NCCL in 1986 over the dissention caused by the
Independent Inquiry into the Miners' Dispute,ofwhich I was a member.
4
I
harboured the notion that the civil liberties movement was a politically
neutral pursuit ± an idea widely shared, but deeply divisive within NCCL's
constituency that included Tony Benn, Paul Boateng, Michael Foot, and Ken
Livingstone. Before going to Harvard, I had a brief interlude at Oxford
University, where I am still a Research Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal
Studies.
At Harvard, and now at Georgetown, I discovered a third, and I think
final, passion ± the public's health and welfare, which was first expressed in
my work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, then population health, and now
global health. Through my scholarship on health, I have come to question the
strident and prevailing orthodoxies in Western law and culture about the
primacy of individuals ± autonomy, privacy, and liberty as near absolute
values. Although individual interests are important, they have overshadowed
equally compelling collective interests in the health, safety, and wellbeing of
the community.
What was the political philosophy, and literature, that brought me through
a journey that began with the rights of mental patients, to the civil liberties of
595
2L.O. Gostin, AHuman Condition: The Mental Health Act, 1959 to 1975:
Observations, Analysis, and Proposals for Change Vol. 1 (1975) and L.O. Gostin,
AHuman Condition: Th e Law Relating to Mentally Abnormal Offend ers ±
Observations, Analysis, and Proposals for Reform Vol. 2 (1977).
3 See P. Wallington, Civil Liberties 1984 (1984).
4 National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), Report of the Independent Inquiry, Civil
Liberties and the Miners' Dispute (1984). See S. McCabe and P. Wallington, with J.
Alderson, L.O. Gostin, and C. Mason, The Police, Public Order, and Civil Liberties:
Legacies of the Miners' Strike (1988).
ß2007 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2007 Cardiff University Law School
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