"There’s this concept of the dignity of risk. Most of us have a very wide range of bad choices we can make that society is O.K. with, but, in a conservatorship..."

"... you’re subject to the decision-making rubric of best interest. And it’s possible we’d all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in."

Said  Zoë Brennan-Krohn, an ACLU lawyer, quoted in "Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare/How the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life—and have held on to it for thirteen years" by By Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker).

As conservatorship law is written, the court is required to determine that a conservatorship is—and remains—necessary. “In practice,” Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a disability-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “this is absolutely not the case. What should be happening is that a judge at a reëvaluation hearing would ask, ‘What else have you tried? Why isn’t anything else working?’ And, if the conservator hasn’t shown that they’ve tried less restrictive options, the conservatorship should be suspended. But I’ve never heard of a judge asking that in any situation.”