Law
In criminal and mental health law, sanity is a legal term denoting that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility for his or her actions. The official legal term is compos mentis. It is generally defined in terms of the absence of insanity (non compos mentis). It is not a medical term, although the opinions of medical experts are often important in making a legal decision as to whether someone is sane or insane. It is also not the same concept as mental illness. One can be acting under profound mental illness and yet be sane, and one can also be ruled insane without an underlying mental illness.
Legal definitions of sanity has been little explored by science and medicine, as the concentration has been on illness.
Read more about this topic: Sanity
Famous quotes containing the word law:
“Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Who to himself is law, no law doth need, Offends no law, and is a king indeed.”
—George Chapman (c. 1559–1634)
“The law of nature is, do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)