42 U.S.C. § 10807
Section 10807 · Legal actions
Amended 2 times on record
Applied in 14 court decisions — leading case Oregon Advocacy Center v. Mink (2003)
Most recently applied in Parent/Professional Advocacy League v. City of Springfield (August 2019)
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year.Markers show enactment, consequential amendments, and circuit splits over this section — watch for a citation surge after a change or a disagreement. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
(a) Prior to instituting any legal action in a Federal or State court on behalf of a 1 individual with mental illness, an eligible system, or a State agency or nonprofit organization which entered into a contract with an eligible system under section 10804(a) of this title, shall exhaust in a timely manner all administrative remedies where appropriate. If, in pursuing administrative remedies, the system, agency, or organization determines that any matter with respect to such individual will not be resolved within a reasonable time, the system, agency, or organization may pursue alternative remedies, including the initiation of a legal action.
(b) Subsection (a) of this section does not apply to any legal action instituted to prevent or eliminate imminent serious harm to a 1 individual with mental illness.
Editorial notes U.S. Code · Office of the Law Revision Counsel
Amendments
1991—Pub. L. 102–173 substituted “individual with mental illness” for “mentally ill individual” in subsecs. (a) and (b).