Why the title?

I really should explain why this blog is called what it is. The best way I can do that is by quoting from an article I published a good few years ago. In that article, I wrote: "There are some classes of people of whose rights, it sometimes seems, all laws have been contemptuous. The records of the Greenlee County Probate Court make salutary reading. On January 22, 1912, at Morenci, Arizona, a deputy-sheriff arrested a 19 year-old Mexican-American woman. She was examined by experts who pronounced her ‘cleanly’ in her habits and found no evidence of mental illness. She had neither attempted nor threatened suicide and, [the experts] wrote, ‘is of a very happy temperament; has a tendency to laugh and sing’. Though they thought that her problems were only temporary, they noted that ‘she wanted to dance’, and concluded: ‘the accused is insane, and it is dangerous to the accused and to the person and property of others by reason of such insanity that the accused go at large’. The unfortunate young woman was committed to the ‘Territorial Asylum for the Insane, at Phoenix, until sufficiently restored to reason, or otherwise discharged according to law’. The papers of the Greenlee County Probate Court also contain an order permitting the same woman’s funds to be used to maintain her in her involuntary confinement. It is dated May 26, 1969. The woman had wanted to dance and was still locked up 57 years later." The article was published in Litigation of March 1992. (See also: David B Wexler, Mental Health Law: Major Issues, 1981, Plenum Press, New York.) This blog shares its title with a new book of mine, as to which …