Legal Capacity & Gender

Dr Anna Arstein-Kerslake is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School. She is the author of one of the first books on the right to legal capacity, Restoring Voice to People with Cognitive Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She supported the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the drafting of their general comment on the right to equal recognition before the law and she has worked with domestic and international bodies around the world on law and policy reform towards the realisation of the right to legal capacity.

• 1. Right to legal capacity: Debates and legal argument.- 2. Personhood: perspectives from critical feminist, disability and queer studies.- 3. Gender, disability & decision-making: Historical discrimination.- 4. Gendered denials: Law, policy and practice.- 5. Vulnerability created by legal capacity denials.- 6. Creating change: Examples of modern reform and recommendations.