Medical evidence of capacity in a legal setting: To what extent do courts and tribunals make their own decisions?

The extent to which legal determinations of capacity are genuinely separate from medical opinion on capacity presented to the court as evidence, is an open and important question. In order to explore this question, an empirical study was done on the use of medical and non-medical evidence to establish capacity in three different capacity contexts: "personal/financial" capacity, testamentary capacity and legal matters capacity. The study showed that the use of medical evidence to establish capacity was by far the heaviest in personal/financial capacity matters, often to the point of effective exclusion of other forms of evidence. Concerns with the weight given to medical evidence in personal/financial capacity matters were identified. The concerns have implications for the specific jurisdiction considered, and for the wider question of how capacity is and should be determined in a legal setting.