The Court of Last Resort looks at decision making in a mental-health court and at the dilemmas of treating mental illness while protecting patients' legal rights. Carol Warren spent seven years studying hearings in a large California court where people who had been involuntarily committed to institutions for psychiatric treatment could petition for their release. In this book she confronts questions of whether mental illness is real or only a label for societal control, whether the government should be involved in committing the deviant to institutions, and how the interaction of judges, psychiatrists, families, police, and other individuals and agencies affect the court's administration of mental-health law. Though the cases in this book fall under California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, Warren's analysis of conflicts between legal and medical models of behavior is of national and international importance both to sociologists and to the many professionals who work at the juncture of mental health and the law.

Half of Indonesia’s massive population still lives on farms, and for these tens of millions of people the revolutionary promise of land reform remains largely unfulfilled. The Basic Agrarian Law, enacted in the wake of the Indonesian revolution, was supposed to provide access to land and equitable returns for peasant farmers. But fifty years later, the law’s objectives of social justice have not been achieved.

Land for the People provides a comprehensive look at land conflict and agrarian reform throughout Indonesia’s recent history, from the roots of land conflicts in the prerevolutionary period and the Sukarno and Suharto regimes, to the present day, in which democratization is creating new contexts for people’s claims to the land. Drawing on studies from across Indonesia’s diverse landscape, the contributors examine some of the most significant issues and events affecting land rights, including shifts in policy from the early postrevolutionary period to the New Order; the Land Administration Project that formed the core of land policy during the late New Order period; a long-running and representative dispute over a golf course in West Java that pitted numerous local farmers against the government and local elites; Suharto’s notorious “million hectare” project that resulted in loss of access to land and resources for numerous indigenous farmers in Kalimantan; and the struggle by Bandung’s urban poor to be treated equitably in the context of commercial land development. Together, these essays provide a critical resource for understanding one of Indonesia’s most pressing and most influential issues.

Contributors: Afrizal, Dianto Bachriadi, Anton Lucas, John McCarthy, John Mansford Prior, Gustaaf Reerink, Carol Warren, and Gunawan Wiradi.

"An important contribution to the study of mental illness, gender roles, and family interaction. . . . An insightful and well-written book demonstrating the pervasive consequences of gender roles for the deepest levels of mind and emotion."--American Journal of Sociology
"Opens a window onto the lives of the mentally ill and their families."--Women's Review of Books "Warren's analysis is painstaking and illuminating, and there is plenty of material here to interest those concerned with issues of gender and mental illness."--Times Higher Education Supplement
"The women make the author's major points in riveting fashion, speaking eloquently of enforced dependency and subjugation, the helplessness of rigid and constantly reinforced gender-role boundaries, and outright manipulation by their husbands."--Contemporary Psychology
"Can marriage make women go crazy? Carol Warren addresses this question by emphasizing the connections between gender-sterotypical behavior and the institutionalization of married women in the 1950s, using interviews collected . . . during 1957-61. . . . An interesting sociological reworking of the original pychologically oriented interpretation of the interviews."--Oral History Review
Carol A. B. Warren is a professor of sociology at the University of Kansas and author of The Court of Last Resort: Mental Illness and the Law.