Belt on Blumenthal, "Law and the Modern Mind"

Happy thanksgiving! We are grateful to JOTWELL's legal history section, for continually flagging great new work in our field. Here's a recent installment that we missed: Rabia Belt (Stanford University) has written an admiring review of Susanna Blumenthal's Law and the Modern Mind (Harvard University Press, 2016). Here's the first paragraph:

Every law student worth her salt has read, or at least heard of, Oliver Wendell Holmes and The Common Law.¹ His formulation of the reasonable man (or, as we call it now, reasonable person) standard structures the foundation of the law school curriculum. Susanna Blumenthal’s Law and the Modern Mind sheds light on a curious figure lurking behind that reasonable man – the “default legal person,” a phrase of Blumenthal’s creation. The default legal person standard, the determination whether people were mentally competent and thus legally responsible, “stood at the borderline of legal capacity, identifying those who were properly exempted from the rules of law that were applicable to everyone else.” (P. 12.) This quirky character “effectively delimited the universe of capable individuals who could be made subject to the prescriptive authority of the reasonable man…. [He] was supposed to remain at the margins of the common law, standing for the presumption of sanity that, jurists expected, would be warranted in most cases.” (Id.) On the one side lay rationality and legal responsibility; on the other, madness and legal exoneration. It was up to jurists, with the aid of mental health doctors, to discern the difference between the two, and therein lies the project of Blumenthal’s book.

Read on here.