James Toomey graduated from Harvard Law School with a JD in 2019. As a student fellow during the 2018-2019 academic year, he wrote a paper entitled “How to End Our Stories: Dementia, Narrative Personal Identity and Seniors’ Theories of Legal Capacity.” He argued from analysis of interviews and an online survey of seniors that a concept of legal capacity based on the narrative consistency of a given decision with an individual’s life story, rather than the current doctrine’s analysis of the mechanical functioning of the individual’s mind, would better reflect how seniors think about questions of dementia and decision-making.

You can read his blog posts on the Bill of Health here.