Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the opportunity posed by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2006 as an important moment to question and challenge the organising binaries in this context and to foreground their problematic effects in terms of shaping the legal subject and demarcating the role and responsibilities of the state and other institutions. It examines depth the construction and deployment of the capacity/incapacity binary, and its effects in terms of sorting individuals into different legal spaces. The book looks at the sorting of individuals into fixed and static identities in the legislative framework, this time through the care/disability binary. It considers the way that the public/private divide is deployed in mental capacity jurisprudence, and the stark effects that this has both at a theoretical and a practical level.