 This emphasis on decision-relativity differs markedly from ideas accepted in an earlier era when decisional capacity was thought to extend globally over time and place, irrespective of context. Indeed, this more global notion continues to be employed in some areas of law. One illustration of the now widespread acceptance of decision relativity in medicine is that certain tests once thought to be perfectly acceptable tests of decisional capacity are no longer deemed to be so. A case in point is the mini-mental state examination (Folstein, Folstein, &amp; McHugh 1975). This is a simple psychometric tool that was developed to help clinicians assess how disoriented (or not) their patients are, by ranking patient responses to familiar questions such as, “Where are you right now?” Some questions also address basic perceptual and mental skills (Can you count back from 100 subtracting 7 at a time?). Although extremely popular and still used as a rough assessment of orientation, it is now thought to be too global and general to serve as assessment of a patient’s mental capacity to make treatment decisions. By law, assessment must now be more “case-specific” and responsive to “situational variations in demands” (Grisso &amp; Appelbaum 1998: 22).