Re‐thinking the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Towards the Next Generation of Law

Abstract

It is now more than a quarter of a century since the Law Commission completed its groundbreaking report on mental capacity, a report that became the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Since that time, there have been fundamental changes in the legal, social, and academic understanding of people with mental disabilities, and the pragmatics of legislative implementation have exposed difficulties that the Law Commission did not foresee. This paper considers key elements of the Act in light of those changed expectations and the experience of implementation