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| A crowd protesting artist Peter Max's forced guardianship. |
The Population Reference Bureau estimates that within the next eight years, more than seventy-six million U.S. residents will be over the age of sixty-five. Many will remain healthy, active, and engaged for the duration of their lives. Others, however, will need assistance.
This is also true for the more than sixty-one million Americans who live with a disability, nearly eight million of whom are estimated to need help with personal care. That’s where guardianship—or if real estate is involved, conservatorship—comes into play.
In its most perfect form, a guardian is appointed by a court to help an
elderly or disabled person who has been deemed “incapacitated”—defined
as being unable to manage self-care or the tasks of daily living. The
goal is to protect them from abuse, neglect, and exploitation. But as
the well-publicized guardianship cases of Peter Falk, Britney Spears, and Wendy Williams
have revealed, guardianship can include gross judicial overreach and
lead to overly restrictive control by one person over another. (Click to continue reading)
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