Before becoming a professor, I spent 13 years as a practitioner, mostly representing criminal defendants with mental disabilities and persons subjected to involuntary civil commitment or committed to psychiatric hospitals. I have taught mental disability law for 24 years, and in the past 17 of those years, my research and scholarship have focused mostly on the ways that prejudice towards persons with mental disabilities leads to stigma and stereotyping, and the ways that these factors malignantly distort both the legislative and judicial processes.
I believe that these factors are constant whether the topic is commitment, the right to refuse treatment, sexual autonomy, deinstitutionalization, any aspect of the criminal trial process, from the determination of competency to stand trial to the ultimate death penalty decision, or the relationship between international human rights law and mental disability law. I am the only law professor in the nation (and most likely, the world) who has created nine different courses in this subject matter; I’ve also written twenty books and nearly 200 articles in this area.
Learn About The Intersection Of Mental Disability And International Human Rights Law
For the past several years, I have refocused my professional career and have turned my attention to the intersection of mental disability law with international human rights law.
• Under the aegis of Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI), a Washington, DC-based human rights advocacy NGO, I have done site visits and conducted mental disability law training workshops in Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Uruguay, and Bulgaria.
• Through New York Law School’s (NYLS) Online Distance Learning Mental Disability Law program, I have taught mental disability law courses in Japan and Nicaragua, and have worked extensively in Nicaragua with local advocates and activists in an effort to build a mental disability advocacy network in that nation: one that could optimally be expanded to other nations in Central and South America. We are currently working with colleagues in China, Japan and East Africa to teach new courses in those nations and forge new partnerships with other law schools and universities.
• Through the International Mental Disability Law Reform Project of the NYLS Justice Action Center, I have done work in Taiwan, Japan, Poland, the Czech Republic, China, and Uganda.
This work has clarified for me the extent of our societal blindness to the ongoing violations of international human rights law in the context of the institutional commitment and treatment of persons with mental disabilities. Notwithstanding a robust set of international law principles, standards and doctrines—many based on American constitutional law decisions and statutory reforms of the past three decades—people with mental disabilities live in some of the harshest conditions that exist in any society. These conditions are the product of neglect, lack of legal protection against improper and abusive treatment, and, primarily, again, the social attitudes that perpetuate stigma, prejudice and stereotyping.
Ever since I began practicing law as a rookie Public Defender in Trenton, NJ, in 1971, I have been aware that we think about and treat persons with mental disabilities in the legal system differently than we do others. Nearly ten years ago, I wrote,“I had grown accustomed to asides, snickers, and comments from judges, to ‘eye rolling’ from my adversaries, to running monologue commentaries by bailiffs and court clerks (all about my clients’ ‘oddness’).” This is still true today.
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