This chapter summarizes the author’s work during the decade of the 1970s, where he began teaching a Law and Psychiatry seminar that soon became a newly named course Mental Health Law. His writings were in the areas of civil commitment, criminal commitment, behavior modification and token economies, and confidentiality. While the author was working generally in the field of mental health law, many “seeds” of the perspective of therapeutic jurisprudence grew out of that work. The chapter illustrates how the main concepts of therapeutic jurisprudence were developed during the 1970s, even though therapeutic jurisprudence itself was not “born” until an essay written for a law/psychology conference in 1987.
Some Reflections on Liberty: Bruce Winick’s ‘Civil Commitment: A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Model’