Making Sense of “Insanity”: Law, Psychiatry, and the Royal Commission on the Law of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases

Abstract

Abstract.In 1954, the Canadian government established the Royal Commission on the Law of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases. While its final report had little impact at the time, the creation of the commission points to the emergence of insanity as a newly complex problem within the context of postwar Canada. Spurred on by the growing psychiatric profession and the destabilization of capital punishment as a viable sentence, the commission quickly realized that the building blocks of its solution – legal and psychiatric expertise – were largely incompatible. This article explores the commission’s problematization of insanity, which, far from providing solutions, highlighted the difficulties surrounding the integration of both psychiatric and legal knowledges of the day. The commission played an important role in upholding the status quo, and it provides an early example of the stasis that would characterize this area of the law until the early 1990s.