Legal Norms Regarding the Assessment of the Ability to Drive Motor Vehicles

: The forensic expertise regarding the assessment of the ability to drive a motor vehicle on public roads is a necessity for both the person in question [driver] and for the authorities that request it. This type of examination raises the issue of a legislative void in that the current laws fail to provide for the plethora of situations/diagnoses encountered in practice. This paper aims to draw attention on the major differences between the legislative provisions on amateur drivers in comparison with professional drivers, given the potential for similar social danger between both categories, and also on the difficulty of establishing this quality in psychiatric patients. For this purpose, we have compared the judicial requirements for both categories of drivers to better understand their shortcomings and we have analyzed 70 cases of this type of examination to determine the most common diagnoses we encounter.