A few months before the final manuscript of this book was sent to the publisher, Dr. Karl A. Menninger died, shortly before his ninety seventh birthday. Thus, when I sat down to write this preface, he was very much on my mind. I remembered that it had been almost forty years since he wrote A Manual for Psychiatric Case Study, not one of his well-known but probably the most practical of his books. The psycho analytically trained part of me began to wonder what had motivated me to write a book on a topic so similar to that which had earlier drawn the attention of my revered teacher. There is no...

Once upon a time only forensic psychiatrists had much to do with law and the legal system. Now, hardly a day passes in the life of a clinician without some significant encounter with the interface between the law and the practice of psychiatry. That interface extends all the way from the general regulation of clinical practice to the specifics of clinical man- agement of individual patients. It includes, like the chapters of this book, such important topics as informed consent, right to treatment, privilege and confidentiality, patients' rights, competency, psychiatric testimony, malpractice,...