According to Kapp (director, Office of Geriatric Medicine & Gerontology, Wright State University School of Medicine), therapeutic jurisprudence is a framework for "insisting that proponents of particular legal interventions justify those intrusions into otherwise private territory by concretely showing...sufficient real benefits for those whom the law supposedly is intended to help." Kapp uses the analytical lens of therapeutic jurisprudence to explore the ways in which the law in practice, as opposed to theory, can exert positive or negative effects on older people in a variety of contexts, including long term care regulation, end-of-life medical care, protection of research subjects, guardianship, and other interventions. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)