 A slightly different question is about whether the MacCAT-T can be applied in different legal contexts. The legal history in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain has many common roots, and because of this many people assume that the same criteria apply in these different regions. However, it is not always obvious that this is so. In 2005 The Mental Capacity Act (MCA) was passed in England and Wales that, at least on the surface, seems to embrace different criteria from the ones listed above. The MCA criteria are (1) understanding, (2) retaining, (3) using, and (4) weighing and communicating (see Mental Capacity Act in  Other Internet Resources).  Some researchers have concluded that, for all practical purposes, this is the same model. They take “using” to cover appreciation (since one does not use information one does not fully accept) and “weighing” to cover reasoning (which is often understood as the ability to weigh and compare options). But as of now there is no real consensus. Viewing the two sets of criteria as equivalent is, of course, convenient, since then one can make use of the broader English-language literature on capacity assessment without worries about whether it strictly applies to one’s own legal context. For example, based on the assumption that the two models are basically equivalent, some researchers in England have conducted empirical studies of capacity in specific populations of patients using the MacCAT-T (Owen, Szmukler, et al. 2009; Owen, Szmukler, et al. 2013).