La polémica acogida en la jurisprudencia del Tribunal Supremo de los principios del sistema de apoyos de la Ley 8/2021

Abstract

For centuries, the legal approach to people with disabilities has been characterised by indifference, abuse and even repulsion. Law 8/2021 represented a structural break, eradicating incapacitation and establishing, in its place, a model of support geared towards the full exercise of legal capacity. This shift involves placing the will of the individual at the centre of the system, in accordance with the principles of dignity, equality, necessity and proportionality. More than four years after the reform came into force, the case law of the Supreme Court provides a privileged perspective for assessing the degree to which this cultural and legal change has been internalised, as it has consolidated a doctrinal corpus which, with some nuances, reflects a serious effort to adapt judicial practice to the new regulatory framework and has contributed decisively to shaping the contours of the new system. Now is a good time to pause and examine the case law of recent years and assess the extent to which our Supreme Court is adapting to the new scenario. As case law in the decades prior to the reform has shown, the problem for people with disabilities did not lie primarily in the legal rules themselves, but in the intolerable indolence with which they were applied by the courts.