Rights, Law, and Reform

The law already knows how to protect liberty. The question is whether we are willing to demand that guardianship finally live up to it.

This section moves from diagnosis to architecture — from documenting what is broken to building what a better system requires. It examines the constitutional and appellate frameworks that guardianship routinely violates, the legislative alternatives states have begun to adopt, and the affirmative case for supported decision-making as the default replacement for plenary guardianship.

It also draws on the disability rights movement, whose decades of advocacy across the life course offer elder justice its most proven roadmap for reform. The two movements have too often worked in isolation. That separation serves no one except the system both are trying to change.

Reform is not the endpoint. Obsolescence is.

Image: Togwotee Pass, view south to Bighorn National Forest, WY