ABSTRACT
Legal formulation has tended to swing from allowing clinicians extensive discretion to act in their patients’ best interests, towards detailed legal regulation and procedural controls, and back again towards discretion. Therapeutic jurisprudence recognises that the law can help – or hinder – people with a mental disorder. Therapeutic jurisprudence may also be seen as a reaction against the perceived failure of the test-case strategy. Therapeutic jurisprudence is liable to be associated with utilitarianism. Therapeutic jurisprudence provides no support or consolation for professional paternalism. Persons with psychopathy are usually perceived as untreatable by normal psychiatric modalities and this perception has led to a clear cut two level distinction in treatment and disposal. In summary, therapeutic jurisprudence is one way in which the people can ‘take another look’ at psychopathy, providing an alternative perspective on disposal, rooted not in a traditional ‘mad, bad, or sad’ paradigm, but instead in a reasoned approach to responsibility and causal determinism. .
