Was Mexican Artist Legally Insane?

An interesting case bridging art and law, specifically asking what defines a person (in this case a Mexican artist) as legally incompetent to make a gift.

From the LA Times:

A bicoastal legal battle has erupted over who owns 17 drawings by Martín Ramírez, whose artworks, created while he lived in California state mental institutions until his death in 1963, now fetch six-figure sums.

The main question is whether Maureen Hammond, a widowed, retired schoolteacher living in Needles, Calif., was the legitimate recipient of a gift of Ramírez’s drawings from a psychologist who befriended the artist and was the first person to arrange for their display during the 1950s?

Hammond’s attorneys, Rick Richmond and Brent Caslin, said that California court rulings suggest that terms such as “insanity” and “incompetence” in committal forms were general terms during the early 1900s, not clinical ones. The involuntary commitment Ramírez underwent “has no bearing on his ability or mental capacity to make gifts,” Richmond said.

Eric Lieberman, an attorney for the Ramírez estate, said Tuesday that it was clear that the artist was ruled insane when he was committed to a state hospital, “and his diagnosis never changed.”