Online Mental Disability Law Program: About the Program Director

Michael L. Perlin is Professor of Law at New York Law School, 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. For many years, he was an 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 Disability Rights International (DRI), a Washington, D.C.-based human rights advocacy organization on the Advisory Board of the Center of Excellence for Children, Family and the Law at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology (Boston, MA), and on the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Advancement of Law and Mental Health at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). In conjunction with DRI, he has presented mental disability law training workshops in Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Uruguay. 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, and has also taught in Sweden and in Taiwan. He has done extensive work in China with the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law—Asia office through which he has conducted “Training the Trainers” workshops in Xi’an, China to teach experienced death penalty defense lawyers how to train inexperienced lawyers, employing the online distance learning methodologies used in the NYLS online program. As a Fulbright Senior Specialist he has taught International Human Rights and Mental Disability Law to the Global Law Program at the University of Haifa in Israel and has lectured extensively and advised the disability rights clinic at the Islamic University of Indonesia in Yogyakarta.
 

Previously, Professor Perlin was an Adjunct Professor of Law and Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno, California, the Pfizer Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wright State University School of Medicine, and the Ida Beem Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University at Iowa Law School and Medical College.

Professor Perlin is the creator of the first Internet-based mental disability law courses to be offered by an American law school. Course sections are regularly offered at other U.S.-based law schools; Professor Perlin has taught sections of these courses in Japan, Nicaragua, Israel and Finland, and portions of them in Sweden, Taiwan and Indonesia.

His multivolume treatise, Mental Disability Law: Civil and Criminal (Lexis Law Publishing, 1998–2003), which was first published in 1989 by Michie, won the 1990 Walter Jeffords Writing Prize; the five-volume second edition of that treatise won the Otto Walter Writing Award in 2003 and is the indispensable authority for legal practitioners. A seven-volume third edition -- to be co-authored with NYLS Adjunct Prof. Heather Ellis Cucolo -- is currently in preparation. Another book, THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE INSANITY DEFENSE (Carolina Academic Press, 1994), won the Manfred Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law as the best book of the year in law and forensic psychiatry in 1994–95. He was given the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law’s Amicus Award in 1998, and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Network in 2012. The same year, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In the summer 2013, he will receive the first Bruce Winick Award, given by the International Academy of Law and Mental Health (on whose board of directors he sat for twenty years). He has written 23 books and over 250 articles on all aspects of mental disability law. He graduated magna cum laude from Rutgers University and from Columbia University Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.