Abstract
When one thinks of forensic psychiatry, which Seymour Pollack has defined as “the application of psychiatry to legal issues for legal ends, legal purposes,”1 the immediate image is of the insanity plea and the psychiatrist’s role with criminal law. We hear much less of psychiatric involvement with civil law. Reflecting this, there is little in the psychiatric literature about civil law issues. (I know of only three books,2,3,4 two monographs,5,6 and a few articles7 on the subject.) Because, as far as the law is concerned, all that is not criminal is essentially civil, the subject matter covers a vast area. In an oversimplified sense, criminal law maintains public order and essentially deals with crimes against the state; civil law protects individual rights and attempts to resolve disputes between individuals (or between an individual and the State).
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© 1985 Plenum Press, New York
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Rappeport, J.R. (1985). Psychiatry and Civil Law. In: Rosner, R. (eds) Critical Issues in American Psychiatry and the Law. Critical Issues in American Psychiatry and the Law, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4928-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4928-0_5
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