Understanding the law's complex association between criminal insanity and mental disorders

The fundamental legal doctrine of criminal insanity is found in most legal orders. It concerns a defendant’s lack of capacity for responsible action and defines the justifiable use of punishment. It is a key entrance point for comprehending how law conceives of agency and deviancy, but also a highly controversial legal construct. A major concern is that there is a mismatch between how criminal insanity has been paradigmatically understood in law and how it is today inevitably associated with mental disorders. This doctrine has been formulated in terms of folk psychological notions of rational agency but increasingly relies on psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms, with forensic experts as premise providers in criminal proceedings. However, psychiatric constructs were not developed for criminal law and people diagnosed with mental disorders may have vastly varying functional impairments. Legal research has yet to elucidate how this complexity plays out in criminal insanity rules and judgements. There is a pressing need for cross-country empirical and interdisciplinary legal studies that integrate insights from mind sciences to explore this matter. The lack of legal clarity about the relevance of mental disorders raises concerns about the rule of law, unequal treatment, and criminal justice. COMPLEX will advance our understanding of law’s associations between criminal insanity and mental disorders, with a research design that transcends conventional legal research by combining cross-country empirical studies of current legal doctrines with interdisciplinary analysis of how the normative and factual legal premises about mental disorders involved in these doctrines relate to philosophy and mind sciences. The ambition is to provide a new theoretical framework for understanding mental disorders in criminal law. COMPLEX has the potential to challenge current paradigms and have major implications for both science and society.