Understanding California's 50-Year-Old Conservatorship Law: Is There Room for Improvement?
An interview with gifted law student Savanah Walseth
Season 3 | Episode 2 | March 20, 2022
Savanah Walseth is a student at Loyola Law School and was most recently a program manager for the L.A. County Department of Health “Housing for Health” Program. At a young age, she is guided by both lessons learned “in the trenches” given her experience in homeless outreach and engagement for People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), but also in programmatic work managing the COVID response in L.A. County. During the past two years, she was managing the county’s response involving testing, street medicine, outbreak management and contact tracing among the homeless population. Savanah is a graduate of Reed College in Portland.
The topic of this podcast interview is drawn from a paper written by Savanah for a Mental Disability Law Seminar in late 2021. The paper is entitled: Grave Disability: Seeking Restructure through New Definitions.
This interview will provide a basic primer on the California law that governs involuntary hospitalization, the definition of grave disability and conservatorships, the Lanterman Petris Short Act, passed in 1967. We will touch upon the fact that this type of conservatorship differs from the widely publicized conservatorship that Britney Spears was subjected to for nearly 14 years. That is called a probate conservatorship. This 2021 article from CalMatters does a good job distinguishing between the two types of conservatorships.
Savanah’s goal in her law career is to be a civil rights litigator – focusing upon housing and disability rights, especially in the intersections of homelessness and mental health.