CSLS Speaker Series: “Mental Incompetence on the Ground: Community Construction of Disability in Democracy”

Featuring Rabia Belt, Professor of Law and Professor of History (by courtesy), Stanford Law School

Abstract:
Who was mentally competent to vote? Nineteenth-century American lawmakers often treated the answer as self-evident. Beginning in Maine in 1819, states increasingly adopted constitutional provisions and statutes disenfranchising people classified as mentally incompetent. But these lawmakers left a crucial problem unresolved: how would anyone know who belonged within these categories?

Drawing from a book in progress, Disabling Democracy in America: Mental Incompetence, Citizenship, Suffrage, and the Law, 1819-1920, this talk turns to Congressional contested elections to examine what happened when abstract legal classifications encountered the messy realities of community life. In disputes over U.S. Congressional seats, election officials, neighbors, relatives, and other ordinary people testified about individual voters’ mental competence. Their testimony reveals a strikingly contextual process of defining disability. Witnesses relied on kinship, reputation, class, everyday encounters, and behavioral observations. They assessed older men, deaf men, and men they called “crazy.” Sometimes, they even helped men cast ballots while also questioning their competence to vote.

These hearings complicate accounts of disability law that emphasize the growing authority of medical expertise. At the polls, lay knowledge could prove more consequential than doctors’ judgments. The disputes also reveal a tension between the “common sense” embedded in formal law and the “common sense” of communities expected to enforce it. Mental incompetence was not simply a fixed natural characteristic that law identified. Instead, it was a contested category produced through social relationships, local knowledge, and everyday encounters. Disability, in this sense, became part of the ordinary work of constructing American democracy.

In-Person at 2240 Piedmont Ave and livestreamed via Zoom. Light refreshments will be provided. 
Reception: 12:15-12:45 p.m. in the Kadish Library 
Program: 12:45-2:00 p.m. in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room

Register for the livestream via Zoom. Please note registration is not required for in person attendance. 
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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact csls@law.berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible.