ABSTRACT
The past two decades of nineteenth and twentieth century have witnessed a significant extension of the involvement of lawyers and the legal system in matters psychiatric. Much of this activity has had a sharply adversarial edge, with mental health lawyers attacking the procedures and practices of organized psychiatry and on occasion impugning psychiatrists' claims to expert status and authority. One of the major contemporary arenas of conflict between law and psychiatry has been over civil-commitment laws and procedures. One of the earliest and most influential manifestations of this trend was the passage of a new commitment law in California, widely known as the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS). Perhaps even more ironic, conservatorship hearings under LPS take even less time than the five-minute average prior to the act, "the statistic which had prompted legislative interest in involuntary civil commitment in the first place.".
