PUBLIC POLICIES UNDERLYING THE LAW OF MENTAL INCOMPETENCY

Mental incompetency, or legal insanity, has usually been studied in the patchquilt fashion. It appears as a sub-heading of incidental interest in such widely diversified subjects as crimes, contracts, domestic relations, torts and wills. It can, however, be conceived of as a single strand in the seamless web. So viewed, it may appear to wind in and out of the various artificial subdivisions of the law, cutting across each at one particular place or another.

And so conceived, it can be studied according to the second and less orthodox method of analysis. Few are the isolated areas in the law which are not intersected by this strand. Hence, any exhaustive, analysis, even according to the single strand method, would bulk too large for one article. A beginning may be made, however, by scrutinizing the strand itself, and tracing its windings through one or two of the usual subdivisions of the law.