Evaluating Decision Making Capacity in Older Individuals: Does the Law Give a Clue?

Marshall B. Kapp
Additional contact information
Marshall B. Kapp: Center for Innovative Collaboration in Medicine & Law, Florida State University, College of Medicine and College of Law, 1115 W. Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4300, USA

Laws, 2015, vol. 4, issue 2, 1-9

Abstract: Adequate cognitive and emotional capacity is essential to autonomous decision making by adult medical patients. Society often attaches legal consequences to decisional capacity evaluations. Even when the legal system is not formally involved in the competency evaluation of a particular individual, clinical practice and ethical conduct occur within and are informed by legal parameters. Using relevant statutory, court rule, and judicial opinion examples from a representative jurisdiction within the United States, this article argues that the law seldom provides much meaningful guidance to health care and human services providers to assist them regarding the content of capacity evaluation. The article concludes by asking how society ought to respond to the paucity of helpful guidance provided by the law in the decisional capacity evaluation context.

Keywords: legal; jurisprudence; guardianship; capacity; competence; ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 E61 E62 F13 F42 F68 K0 K1 K2 K3 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/4/2/164/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/4/2/164/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlawss:v:4:y:2015:i:2:p:164-172:d:50016

Access Statistics for this article

Laws is currently edited by Ms. Heather Liang

More articles in Laws from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().