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Chris Williams, "The Abrogation of Subjectivity in the Psychiatric Courtroom: Toward a Psychoanalytic Semiotic Analysis", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. XI no.32 (1998), 181-192: Recent semiotic work analyzing the psychiatric courtroom offers much in the way of theoretical exposition. What is missing is targeted application. This essay applies a psychoanalytic semiotics of law to the problem of clinicolegal decision making. The conceptual backdrop for this investigation includes Lacan's notion of subjectivity understood as desire. At issue is the absence of the disordered subject's being and way of knowing in the process of discoursing about psychiatric justice, and how the clinicolegal apparatus perpetuates this alienating and oppressive outcome. The theoretical work is contextualized by offering a provisional and speculative assessment of the U.S. Appellate case of Boggs vs. N.Y. City Health & Hospital Corp (1987).

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