Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture

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Susanna L. Blumenthal

Law and the Modern Mind

Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture

Susanna L. Blumenthal

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English

Harvard University Press
22 February 2016

Law; Law & society; Laws of Specific jurisdictions

In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders' vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency, and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence.

Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical, and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women, and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons.

In calling attention to the problematic relationship between consciousness and liability, Law and the Modern Mind casts new light on the meanings of freedom in the formative era of American law.

By: Susanna L. Blumenthal
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 36mm
Weight: 726g
ISBN: 9780674048935
ISBN 10: 0674048938
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 22 February 2016
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Further / Higher Education , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Susanna L. Blumenthal is Julius E. Davis Professor of Law and Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she is Co-Director of the Program in Law and History.

Reviews for Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture

Susanna L. Blumenthal s book is a thoughtful study of American law s confrontation with insanity during the 19th century <i>Law and the Modern Mind</i> traces variations of the insanity theme as it plays out in each legal field. Though the book is by no means a technical lawyers manual, Blumenthal is a sure-footed guide through this doctrinal thicket; just as importantly, she narrates gripping human stories from the era s legal treatises, as well as those that unravel with greater vividness in court proceedings.--Meir Dan-Cohen Los Angeles Review of Books (11/06/2016)