Civil commitment laws in nineteenth-century New York

The roots of nineteenth-century American civil commitment law lay in English common law, in particular poor law, with its mixed motives of helping lunatics and of protecting the community from them. As state institutions assumed an increasingly large share of the burden of restraint in the 1840s and 1850s, such confinement decisions became subject to greater public scrutiny. This can be seen particularly clearly in New York State, which in 1842 passed a law requiring that two physicians examine each alleged lunatic and report their findings to a judge who then made the final commitment decision. After the Civil War, a number of legal decisions limited the state's power to initiate civil commitments to cases of clear social danger, though families were not so confined. An 1874 statute further tightened procedural guidelines for civil commitments. A State Commissioner in Lunacy was appointed to oversee the internal workings of lunatic asylums. Yet such legal “reforms” failed to slow the increasing tendency of both families and communities to use such institutions as long-term holding places for the socially marginal or threatening.