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.

"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.