Recent decisions in the Law Courts leave the law relating to improper or negligent certification in a very unsatisfactory position; and that not only from the point of view of the medical practitioner. The effect of the decision in Harnett v. Fisher ([1927] Appeal Cases 573) is that a person of sound mind who has been improperly certified as insane through the negligence of the certifying physician, and has as a result of that negligence been deprived of his liberty for a period exceeding six years during which it has been impossible for him to take legal proceedings, is by his failure to do so—in other words, by the very gravity of the wrong that he has suffered—deprived of any remedy for that wrong against the person to whose negligence it is traceable.