| Comparative Disability and Mental Health Law

The course offers an intensive examination of questions that arise in addressing legal issues  pertaining to disability and mental health. For instance, is it valid for a worker who becomes  disabled to claim that the employer should change the regular workplace set up or rules, to  accommodate his or her requirements? Will it amount to discrimination on the basis of  disability, if the employer refuses to do so? Conversely, will it be an unfair burden on the  employer and thereby, result in an inefficient outcome, if the law requires the employer to do  so? To consider another question, why should mental illness be a ground for divorce? Instead  of enabling the other spouse to dissolve the marriage, should the law not make him/her  responsible for taking care of the disabled spouse? Or, how do we reason about claims by  severely disabled people or their care-givers, that the law should allow their lives to be ended?

Disability and mental health law is not a clearly defined area of study or practice, but is largely  made out of building blocks collected from the fields of constitutional law, criminal law,  family law and labour law. As a result, every disability or mental health specific question  covered in this course will be examined with reference to foundational legal themes such as  legal personhood, culpability, capacity to consent, grounds for divorce, the operation of non

discrimination laws and so on. In addition to this grounding in foundational legal concepts,  the course will offer detailed examination of legal issues which are new to disability  jurisprudence in the Global South, such as “reasonable accommodation”, “supported decision  making” and “advanced directives”, among others. Given that many legal ideas, arguments  and concepts frequently used in this area of law are still evolving and have assumed different  shapes in different jurisdictions, the course will be entirely comparative in nature. Different  aspects of the questions covered in the course, will be studied by examining how they are dealt  with across jurisdictions. We will mainly use material from common law jurisdictions, namely,  the US, Canada, the UK, and India.