Abstract

Although the Fourteenth Amendment provides that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States," the Constitution does not treat all persons' citizenships equally. Rather, the Constitution qualifies--or limits--many citizens' citizenship. The citizenship of mentally ill people is particularly qualified upon civil commitment when they lose many important civil rights. ;If the Constitution qualifies citizenship for some people, it follows that there must be a constitutional vision of "full" citizenship from which limited citizens differ. What makes some citizens fit for the legal rights associated with full citizenship? What disqualifies others from enjoying these same rights? What do the answers to these questions reveal about the Constitution's vision of full citizenship? ;In this dissertation, I try to piece together a small part of the Constitution's vision of full citizenship by examining some of the theoretical, legal, and practical justifications for limiting constitutional citizenship through civil commitment of the mentally ill. ;I begin with the case of Joyce Brown, which illustrates the difficulty of deciding who qualifies for full citizenship. After finding that the theory of rights leaves underdeveloped its grounds for qualifying citizens such as Brown, I analyze the dilemma as a problem of legal status. I describe how the law of status persists in American constitutional law, granting full citizenship to some people while relegating others, including the civilly committed mentally ill, to second-class statuses. I next look to the history and then the practice of assigning new legal statuses through civil commitment. Both prove insufficient guides for deciding whether to commit Brown, in part because they rely on competing assumptions about the minimum requirements for full citizenship and its rights. ;In Chapter Six, I develop and apply a new standard for assessing the moral and legal adequacy of the current practice of civil commitment. After criticizing several common bases for involuntary hospitalization, I conclude by noting that the remaining rationales--as well as the nature of commitment itself--pose unavoidably political and moral questions that only appropriately authorized individuals should decide