The Complete Lawyer

Michael L. Perlin is Professor of Law at New York Law School (NYLS), director of the Online Mental Disability Law Program, and director of the International Mental Disability Law Reform Project of the law school’s Justice Action Center. He holds teaching appointments as Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Law at the University of Rochester Medical Center and at New York University School of Medicine. He is a former Director of the Division of Mental Health Advocacy in the New Jersey Department of the Public Advocate, and the former Deputy Public Defender in charge of the Mercer County Trenton New Jersey Office of the Public Defender. Professor Perlin now serves on the Board of Advisors of Mental Disabilities Rights International, and on the Board of Directors of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health. In conjunction with Mental Disability Rights International, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights advocacy organization, he has presented mental disability law training workshops in Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Uruguay. In recent years, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute-Law in Florence, Italy; a Visiting Professor at Abo Akademi University/Turku University Law School in Turku, Finland; and a Visiting Scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. He has just been named a Fulbright Senior Specialist to teach at the University of Haifa (Israel) in January 2008. He is also a consultant with the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law-Asia China Office, training experienced criminal defense lawyers in that nation to train inexperienced lawyers using the same instructional and pedagogic techniques he developed in NYLS’s online program Professor Perlin is the creator of the first Internet-based mental disability law courses to be offered by an American law school. International sections of Survey of Mental Disability Law, New York Law School’s initial online course, have been offered in Japan, and Nicaragua; a section of the international course has been offered in Finland. NYLS also hopes to be creating new partnerships in Japan, China and Uganda/Kenya, in the next academic year. Professor Perlin also regularly posts reviews of Bob Dylan concerts on the Internet.