The law relating to detention on the basis of mental disorder and the tribunals at the centre of applications for release should be settled and certain, given that it involves deprivation of liberty and a vulnerable population, two factors that make it important that the law be clear. The vast (and continuingly-developing) body of case law suggests that this is not so.
The aim of this book is to collate important cases relating to the powers and procedures of the relevant tribunals. The book is broken into different sections, arranged alphabetically, each dealing with different areas of the tribunals’ substantive powers or issues of procedure that arise, setting out a summary of the statutory position in the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended by the Mental Health Act 2007 and the Transfer of Tribunal Functions Order 2008) and the relevant tribunal rules (the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) Rules 2008, the Mental Health Review Tribunal for Wales Rules 2008, and the Upper Tribunal Rules 2008), followed by a series of propositions that have been established by the cases; there are then extracts from the relevant cases.
The text of the relevant statutory provisions is set out in an appendix. There is also a full index, which refers to the relevant part of the statute or rules and, if there have been cases, the chapter of the text. I would like to thank Professor Jeremy Cooper for helpful suggestions as to the structure of the book.
The second edition became necessary because of the various changes to the legislative framework, which also prompted the first textbook for some considerable time dealing solely with tribunal proceedings, Jonathan Butler’s “Mental Health Review Tribunals: Law, Practice and Procedure” (Jordans 2009).
Note that in relation to restricted patients, functions previously exercised by the Home Secretary were transferred to the Secretary of State for Justice when the Ministry of Justice was created in 2007. Naturally, most of the cases cited involving restricted patients are from when the Home Secretary exercised the relevant functions.