Incapacity is a term of law that refers to a person's lack of capacity to engage in certain actions to which legal consequences attach. The basis for such a classification is typically insanity, dementia, or a similar mental handicap, although persons can be classified as lacking capacity for other reasons. For example, in the United States, some states have spendthrift laws under which an irresponsible spender may be deemed to lack capacity to enter into contracts. Under the old common law of England, married women lacked the capacity to contract. Law (a loanword from Danish- Norwegian lov), in politics and jurisprudence, is a set of rules or norms of conduct which mandate, proscribe or permit specified relationships among people and organizations, provide methods for ensuring the impartial treatment of such people, and provide punishments for those who do not follow... Capacity, when used with the mathematics meaning, is also called volume. ... Insanity (sometimes, madness) is a semi-permanent severe disorder of the mind, typically as a result of mental illness. ... Dementia (from Latin demens) is progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. ... The Scream, the famous painting commonly thought of as depicting the experience of mental illness. ... A U.S. state is any one of the 50 states which have membership of the federation known as the United States of America (USA or U.S.). The separate state governments and the U.S. federal government share sovereignty. ... This article concerns the common-law legal system, as contrasted with the civil law legal system; for other meanings of the term, within the field of law, see common law (disambiguation). ... The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a country in western Europe, and member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the G8, the European Union, and NATO. Usually known simply as the United Kingdom, the UK, or (inaccurately) as Great Britain or Britain, the UK has four constituent...

Incapacity is a defense to a contract, because a person who lacks capacity to make contracts can not be held to them. Incapacity has been held by many courts not to be a defense to torts, however, because immunizing the incapacitated from liability for their wrongs would prevent injured parties from recovering from their losses. A contract is any legally-enforceable promise or set of promises made by one party to another. ... In the common law, a tort is a civil wrong for which the law provides a remedy. ...